“I’m going to reward you for this. I’m going to let you sit between them at dinner. And remember, they’re both free.”
“What do you mean, free?”
“Not engaged or anything. And I think it’s about time you were settling down.”
The other bachelor, Dave Wallace, sat on Miss Coakley’s left, with Harry, as Grace had promised, between Miss Coakley and Miss Rell.
“Grace tells me you’re a great bridge player,” Miss Rell said.
“No, but I like—”
“Which do you consider the greatest authority, Lenz or Works or Whitehall? I don’t know anything about it myself, but I hear people arguing about it at home, I mean I live in Chicago. I belong to a bridge club there and I was just getting so the others didn’t laugh at me when somebody introduced this horrible contract and I simply gave up. That’s the game, you know, where you don’t bid anything but slams and I just haven’t the nerve, I mean in bridge. I don’t want you to think I’m a coward in everything.”
“I—”
“Because I’m not. I made a flight with Lindbergh in Washington. It was arranged through Congressman Burleigh. He’s a great friend of my father’s. You know, Burleigh the paint people in South Chicago. Oh, it was too thrilling for words! But I felt just as safe as if I’d been in a car, safer because once I was in a terrible smash-up out in Lake Forest and the doctor said I was lucky to escape without at least a few broken ribs.
“I was a little bit scared when we first started, but then I thought to myself this is the man who flew from Detroit to Paris and why should anybody be frightened just flying twenty minutes over Washington with him at the wheel. Have you ever been up?”
“Yes, I—”
“Then you don’t know what a real thrill is. Honestly, it just makes you gasp, like the first time you dive in Lake Michigan. I really dive and I swim awfully well and some of the men say I swim awfully well for a girl. There’s one man in Chicago, Lee Roberts—he and his wife are our best friends, I mean my brother’s and mine—Lee calls me Gertrude Ederle; you know she’s the girl who swam across the English Channel and back.
“Of course he says it just joking because naturally I’m not in her class. She’s quite fat, isn’t she? Or haven’t you ever seen her? She looks fat in her pictures. But then you can’t always tell from pictures. There was a picture of me in the rotogravure section that made me look simply hideous.”
Mr. Halpern, on Miss Rell’s right, spoke to her and Harry found himself attacked by Miss Coakley.
“Mr. Burton, I was just telling Mr. Walters about—I don’t know whether you’d be interested or not—maybe you don’t—but still everybody I’ve told, they think—it’s probably—”
“I’m sure I’d like to hear it,” said Harry.
“I hate to bore people with—you know how it is—you’d be too polite to—and this is so awfully—well, it isn’t a thing that—it’s just interesting if you happen—people in Baltimore—though we’ve only lived there a few—”
“If,” said Harry to himself, “she doesn’t complete a sentence in the next two minutes, I’m going to ask Grace for a highball.”
“—it was some people who lived—well, our apartment was just two buildings—they were people you wouldn’t want—but it was in a kind of secluded—not many apartments—it’s a neighborhood that’s just—and my sister’s little boy goes to the same school as—”
“Grace,” said Harry, “am I an old enough customer here to ask for a drink?”
“Whatever you like,” said his hostess.
“I’d like a highball. I had a pretty tough day.”
Miss Rell turned on him.
“Oh, are you in the Street? That’s what they call Wall Street, isn’t it? I should think it would be just thrilling! But I suppose it is hard work, too. You stand there all day and shout at other men, don’t you, and they shout back at you? It must ruin your voice. Why, I know we went to the Illinois-Chicago game last fall and I got excited and yelled so for Illinois that I couldn’t talk for a week.”
“That must have—”
“Do you have football here in the East? Oh, certainly you do! I’d forgotten—Yale and Harvard. And which are the Giants? I never can keep them straight. My father and Lou—that’s my brother; we’re great pals—he and Father read the sporting page religiously every day. I tease them about it and they tease me about reading the society news and the movies. We have great tiffs over it, all in fun of course.
“Father is a great golfer, I mean really. He’s fifty-four years old and he plays the Onwentsia course in sixty, or maybe it’s a hundred and sixty. Which would be right? He wanted me to take it up and begged and begged till finally one day I went out and played nine holes with him.
“I made some wonderful shots, I mean I really did, and he said I had a perfect natural swing and if I would take lessons from the professor it wouldn’t be long before I could be playing in tournaments, just for women I mean. Wouldn’t that be exciting! But I just couldn’t do it; I’d die!
“And besides, it seems to me that girls who win things in sports are always queer looking, at least most of them, and what chance would—I mean it would be almost unheard of if—Well, I just don’t believe I could ever be a champion of anything. Do you play golf?”
“Yes.”
“You ought to try it. It’s lots of fun, especially for a man. I mean men seem to have such good times playing together, the nineteenth hole and all that. And I should think it would be such wonderful relaxation for you over the weekend after that Wall Street grind.”
“I’m not in Wall Street.”
“Oh, now I’ve got an expert here, I wish you’d tell me what are bulls and what are bears? Father’s tried to explain it to me, but
