“What was the occasion?”
“No special occasion. Just Saturday night. Everybody in Clyde goes to the Yacht Club Saturday nights. There’s no river or lake and no yachts, but they have a sunset gun, so I suppose they’re entitled to call it a yacht club. Grace hated it at first and let Ed go alone, but that only made him drink more and get home later Sunday mornings. Besides, she’s always been a little jealous, and probably with reason. So she decided to go with him and try to enjoy herself. Grace loves to dance and there are some awfully good dancers in Clyde; that is, early in the evening, before they begin to flounder and reel.
“Of course nobody can say Ed married her under false pretenses. She went into it with her eyes wide open. She saw him for the first time at one of those parties and she fell in love with him when he got mad at a man and knocked him down for cutting in on a dance. The man was about half Ed’s size and Ed hit him when he wasn’t looking. That didn’t make any difference to Grace. And it didn’t seem to make any difference to the Yacht Club. Anybody else would have been expelled, but Ed begged everyone’s pardon and wasn’t even scolded.
“That first night he asked Grace to let him drive her home. She was visiting Helen Morse, and Helen advised her not to take the chance. Ed didn’t seem to be in very good driving condition. But Grace was so crazy about him that she told him yes. And then he forgot all about it, went home with another girl and left Grace at the club with some people she hardly knew. She had to call up the Morses and get them to come back after her.
“Well, they met again the next week and Grace thought she would put him in his place by ignoring him entirely, but that didn’t work because he didn’t remember having seen her before. He was comparatively sober this time and awfully nice and attentive. I’ll admit Ed can be nice when he wants to. After that they played tennis together two or three times and then Ed proposed and Grace accepted him and he said he couldn’t wait for a big wedding and she agreed to marry him secretly at Colby, a town about thirty miles from Clyde. She was to be in front of the Clyde post-office at twelve o’clock on a certain day and he was to pick her up in his car and drive to Colby and be married.
“The day came and she waited for him an hour and then went back to the Morses’. That evening he telephoned that he had made a mistake in the day and had just discovered it, and would she please forgive him and meet him the next day at the same place. I blush to say she succumbed, though she suspected what she found out later to be true—Ed had been on a bat and was sleeping it off at the time he was supposed to do his eloping.
“They were married and Ed behaved beautifully on the honeymoon. They spent two weeks in New York and went to the theatre every night and sightseeing in the mornings and afternoons. He had men friends of his to dinner once or twice and gave them all they wanted to drink, but wouldn’t touch anything himself.
“When they got back to Clyde, Ed bought a lovely house already furnished, and the furniture was just what Grace would have picked out. Grace was so happy it seemed as if it couldn’t last, and it didn’t.
“They had been in Clyde a week when Ed announced that he had to go away on a trip. He didn’t trouble to say where or why or how long. He just went, stayed away five days and came home looking as if he had had five or six operations. Grace tried to get him to tell her where he had been, but he just laughed and said it was a secret.
“And that’s the way things have gone on ever since. Ed’s got plenty of money and he gives Grace all she can possibly spend, besides buying her presents that are always lovely and terribly expensive. He’ll be as good as pie for weeks and weeks—except for the Saturday night carousal—and then he’ll disappear for a few days and she won’t know where he is or when to expect him home. Her life is one surprise after another. But when he suddenly hits her in the eye, it’s more than a surprise. It’s a kind of a shock. At least it would be to me.”
“When did it happen?” asked Mrs. Taylor.
“A week ago Saturday,” said Mrs. Hammond. “There was the usual party at the Yacht Club and Ed took more than his usual amount to drink. Along about midnight he disappeared, and so did a girl named Eva Grayson.
“Finally Grace went home, but she sat up and waited for Ed. He came in about four o’clock, pie-eyed. He walked right to where Grace was sitting and without saying anything at all, he hit her, not hard enough to knock her out of her chair but with enough force to really hurt. Then, still not saying anything, he went to bed without taking the time to undress.
“In the morning, or whenever he woke up, he noticed that Grace’s eye was discolored and asked her what had happened. She told him and he made no attempt to deny it. All he said was, ‘Dearest, I can’t tell you how sorry I am. You must believe me when I say I had no idea it was you. I thought it was Eva Grayson. And she deserved to be hit.’
“Can you imagine forgiving a man for a thing like that? Can you imagine continuing to live with him and love
