Affinities and Other Stories Part 17

"I'm glad you had a good time, Bill," I said after a little silence.

"I'm afraid the girls didn't enjoy it much. You men were either golfing or swimming or shooting, and there wasn't much to do but talk."

Bill said nothing. I thought he might be resentful, and I was in a softened mood.

"I didn't really mind your staying downstairs the other night with Carrie," I said. "Bill, do smell the honeysuckle. Doesn't it remind you of the night you asked me to marry you?"

Still Bill said nothing. I leaned over and looked at him. As usual he was asleep.

About the middle of the week Roger Waite called me up. We did not often meet--two or three times in the winter at a ball, or once in a season at a dinner. Ida Elliott always said he avoided me because it hurt him to see me. We had been rather sentimental. He would dance once with me, saying very little, and go away as soon as he decently could directly the dance was over. Sometimes I had thought that it pleased him to fancy himself still in love with me, and it's perfectly true that he showed no signs of marrying. It was rather the thing for the debutantes to go crazy about Roger. He had an air of knowing such a lot and keeping it from them.

"Why don't you keep him around?" Ida asked me once. "He's so ornamental.

I'm not strong for tame cats, but I wouldn't mind Roger on the hearthrug myself."

But up to this time I'd never really wanted anybody on the hearthrug but Bill. If I do say it, I was a perfectly contented wife until the time Carrie Smith made her historic effort to revive the past. "Let sleeping dogs lie" is my motto now--and tame cats too.

Well, Roger called me up, and there was the little thrill in his voice that I used to think he kept for me. I know better now.

"What's this about going out to Carrie Smith's?" he said over the phone.

"That's all," I replied. "You're invited and I'm going."

"O!" said Roger. And waited a moment. Then:

"I was going on to the polo," he said, "but of course--What's wrong with Bill and polo?"

"He's going."

"Oh!" said Roger. "Well, then, I think I'll go to Carrie's. It sounds too good to be true--you, and no scowling husband in the offing!"

"It's--it's rather a long time since you and I had a real talk."

"Too long," said Roger. "Too long by about three years."

That afternoon he sent me a great box of flowers. My conscience was troubling me rather, so I sent them down to the dinner table. Whatever happened I was not going to lie about them.

But Bill only frowned.

"I've just paid a florist's bill of two hundred dollars," he grumbled.

"Cut out the American beauties, old dear."

It was not his tone that made me angry. It was his calm a.s.sumption that I had bought the things. As if no one would think of sending me flowers!

"If you would stop sending orchids to silly debutantes when they come out," I snapped, "there would be no such florist's bills."

One way or another Bill got on my nerves that week. He brought Wallie Smith home one night to dinner, and Wallie got on my nerves too. I could remember, when Wallie and Carrie were engaged and we were just married, how he used to come and talk us black in the face about Carrie.

"How's Carrie, Wallie?" I said during the soup.

"She's all right," he replied, and changed the subject. But later in the evening, while Bill was walking on the lawn with a cigar, he broke out for fair.

"Carrie's on a milk diet," he said apropos of nothing. "If she stays on it another week I'm going to Colorado. She's positively brutal, and she hasn't ordered a real dinner for anybody for a week."

"Really!" I said.

He got up and towered over me.

"Look here, Clara," he said; "you're a sensible woman. Am I fat? Am I bald? Am I a doddering and toothless venerable? To hear Carrie this past few days you'd think I need to wear overshoes when I go out in the gra.s.s."

I rather started, because I'd been looking at Bill at that minute and wondering if he was getting his feet wet. He had only pumps on.

"It isn't only that she's brutal," he said, "she has soft moments when she mothers me. Confound it, I don't want to be mothered! She's taken off eight pounds," he went on gloomily. "And that isn't the worst." He lowered his voice. "I found her crying over some old letters the other day. She isn't happy, Clara. You know she could have married a lot of fellows. She was the most popular girl I ever knew."

Well, I'd known Carrie longer than he had, and of course a lot of men used to hang round her house because there was always something to do.

But I'd never known that such a lot of them made love to Carrie or wanted to marry her. She was clever enough to hesitate over Wallie, but, believe me, she knew she had him cinched before she ran any risk.

However:

"I'm sure you've tried to make her happy," I said. "But of course she was awfully popular."

I'm not so very keen about Carrie, but the way I felt that week, when it was a question between a husband and a wife, I was for the wife. "Of course," I said as Bill came within hearing distance, "it's not easy, when one's had a lot of attention, to settle down to one man, especially if the man is considerably older and--and settled."

That was a wrong move, as it turned out. For Bill, who never says much, got quieter than ever, and announced, just before he went to bed, that he'd given up the polo game. I was furious. I'd had one or two simple little frocks run up for Carrie's party, and by the greatest sort of luck I'd happened on a piece of flowered lawn almost exactly like one Roger used to be crazy about.

For twenty-four hours things hung in the balance. Bill has a hideous way of doing what he says he'll do. Roger had sent more flowers--not roses this time, but mignonette and valley lilies, with a few white orchids. It looked rather bridey. It would have been too maddening to have Bill queer the whole thing at the last minute.

But I fixed things at bridge one night by saying that I thought married people were always better off for short separations, and that I was never so fond of Bill as when he'd been away for a few days.

"Polo for me!" said Bill.

And I went out during my dummy hand and telephoned Carrie.

I hope I have been clear about the way the thing began. I feel that my situation should be explained. For one thing, all sorts of silly stories are going round, and it is stupid of people to think they cannot ask Roger and me to the same dinners. If Bill would only act like a Christian, and not roar the moment his name is mentioned, there would be a chance for the thing to die out. But you know what Bill is.

Well, the husbands left on Sat.u.r.day morning, and by eleven o'clock Ida, Alice and I were all at Carrie's. The change in her was simply startling. She looked like a willow wand. She'd put her hair low on her neck, and except for a touch of black on her eyelashes, and of course her lips coloured, she hadn't a speck of makeup on. She'd taken the pearls out of her ears, too, and she wore tennis clothes and flat-heeled shoes that made her look like a child.

She was sending the children off in the car as we went up the drive.

"They're off to mother's," she said. "I'll miss them frightfully, but this is a real lark, girls, and I can't imagine anything more killing to romance than small children."

She kissed the top of the baby's head, and he yelled like a trooper.

Then the motor drove off, and, as Alice Warrington said, the stage was set.

"Get your tennis things on," Carrie said. "The men will be here for lunch."

We said with one voice that we wouldn't play tennis. It was too hot. She eyed us coldly.

"For heaven's sake," she said, "play up. n.o.body asked you to play tennis. But if you are asked don't say it's too hot. Do any of the flappers at the club ever find it too hot to play? Sprain an ankle or break a racket, but don't talk about its being too violent, or that you've given it up the last few years. Try to remember that for two days you're in the game again, and don't take on a handicap to begin with."

Well, things started off all right, I'll have to admit that, although Carrie looked a trifle queer when Harry Delaney, getting out of the motor that had brought them from the station, held out a baby's rattle to her.