“Guess who I sat next at dinner—Fannie Leaf’s daughter, the youngest one. She’s visiting Robert and Isabel.”
“Fannie Leaf’s daughter! Well, I never! What’s she like?”
“A pretty little thing—looks the way Fannie used to, pink cheeks and dimples and curly light hair.”
“Well, wasn’t that nice for her, to sit next you and have you know her mother and father and everything—here, let me give you some more coffee. Did she give you any news of Fannie and Prentice?”
“Some new grandchildren since last we heard. A grandmother! Poor old Fannie, I bet she doesn’t like that. Makes her sound pretty old, don’t it?”
“It don’t seem possible. I always think of her the way she was on her wedding day, so slender and laughing—the prettiest bride I ever saw, I think, and the youngest looking. But Isabel Leaf says she’s aged awfully, and gotten so fat and settled—what do you want? Matches? Wait a minute, I’ll get them for you. Well, I can’t get over how nice it was for her having you for a partner!”
“She’s not much of a dancer, though. We didn’t get on very well together.”
“Well, if she couldn’t dance with you, she couldn’t dance with anyone.”
He went happily into the living-room, to the sunshine and the Sunday papers. Last night he had been hurt by Margery Page’s straying attention, vague answers, and frequent stiffenings of the jaw that meant yawns suppressed. She had had plenty to say to the Princeton sophomore on her other side, plenty of things to giggle about. And although she and Victor certainly had not gotten on very well when they were dancing together, he had seen her swooping and dipping almost professionally with other partners. But no matter what suspicion stole on him in the outside world that he was not as young as he used to be, that he was not as fascinating as he wanted to be, at home where they loved and admired him so he found the Fountain of Youth.
He hunted out the funny papers, and lit a fresh cigarette. She had been as pretty as a picture, with all those yellow curls. Perhaps, she had just been shy with an older man, “A man of the world,” he thought rather complacently. He hadn’t anything especial to do today—he might go in to Wilmington after lunch and call on her. It would be polite, and she would be pleased.
XXX
War swept the world. “Oh, if only I could go over and drive an ambulance!” Maggie thought, longing to be in the thick of things, longing to fling out her life in service in the mud, under the star-shells, and having to be content with knitting socks and going without sugar. Lily couldn’t manage socks, but she knitted sweaters—sweaters for giants, vast, enormous, tiny sweaters for brownies. And yet the directions were always the same—she couldn’t understand why they turned out so different, or why they had so many openwork places. “More holy than righteous,” said Maggie, picking up Lily’s dropped stitches. Lily wanted to fasten little cheering notes to the sweaters, but she was too shy. She talked all the time about “Our Boys,” and sang, with pleasurable tears in her eyes:
“ ‘There’s a long long trail a-winding
To the land of my dreams,
Where the nightingale is singing,
And a white moon beams—’ ”
She thought it was the sweetest song she had ever heard. It was dashing to have Maggie say one day,
“I don’t think so much of that song—or maybe it’s the way you’re singing it?”
Victor was on committees for raising money, for giving patriotic balls, for arranging benefit performances. He had never been so important and busy in his life, and when peace came he was a pricked balloon.
Saturday Market in Wilmington! The farmers’ wagons were pulled up along the curb, chickens and eggs, butter, and boxes of blackberries, and tight bunches of red and yellow flowers were spread out for sale. Women with baskets on their arms priced, bargained, tasted, stopped to gossip in midstream.
“What you asking for peaches? Kinda green, ain’t they?”
“Let’s try a piece of your cheese—”
Rich women, poor women, white women, black women, filling their market baskets—sea green cabbages, limp-necked poultry, a little wooden boat of cottage-cheese, a fist of yellow banana fingers, sometimes for the spirit’s sake a bunch of marigolds and bee-balm, solid as worsted work.
Maggie shifted her heavy basket from arm to arm. A couple of canteloupes, and then she could go over to the library and rest until it was time to catch the car for home.
While she was pressing her thumb into the cantaloupes and smelling them, the pain came again, so that she could hardly stand. She set her teeth, feeling the sweat spring out on her upper lip. If she could just live through this second—the next—the next—
The pain became the center of everything, gathered all creation into itself. Streets, houses, forests, seas, the sun and sky, concentrated in that one spot of torture. Then it ebbed away, left her. She managed to get her basket over to Market Street and up the long flight of library steps, she managed to change Lily’s library book.
Each time she thought it wouldn’t come again. But it was coming oftener, and it was worse. She faced it, sitting with her basket at her feet, turning over the pages of something—“The Musical Courier.”
She was afraid to go to the doctor, that was the truth. But how silly, when probably he’d say “Don’t eat tomatoes,” or “Drink hot water,” and she’d be all right again. She had nearly fainted on the street just now—she certainly would have to do something.
And she made up her mind to go to the doctor now, before she lost her courage. What doctor? She didn’t know. They hadn’t had one for so long. She would telephone Isabel Leaf and ask her who was good.
“Oh, I hope it’s nothing serious!” Isabel said.
“Oh, no, nothing at all, really—”
“We always go to Dr. Henderson on
