Complete Stories - Dorothy Parker

Lolita.

Mrs. Ewing was a short woman who accepted the obligation borne by so many short women to make up in vivacity what they lack in number of inches from the ground. She was a creature of little pats and prods, little crinklings of the eyes and wrinklings of the nose, little runs and ripples of speech and movement, little spirals of laughter. Whenever Mrs. Ewing entered a place, all stillness left it.

Her age was a matter of guesswork, save for those who had been at school with her. For herself, she declared that she paid no attention to her birthdays-didn"t give a hoot about them; and it is true that when you have ama.s.sed several dozen of the same sort of thing, it loses that rarity which is the excitement of collectors. In the summertime, she wore little cotton play suits, though her only game was bridge, and short socks, revealing the veins along the backs of her legs. For winter, she chose frocks of audible taffeta, frilled and frilled again, and jackets made of the skins of the less-sought-after lower animals. Often, of an evening, she tied a pale ribbon in her hair. Through shimmering heat or stabbing wind Mrs. Ewing trudged to her hairdresser"s; her locks had been so frequently and so drastically brightened and curled that to caress them, one felt, would be rather like running one"s fingers through julienne potatoes. She decorated her small, square face in a manner not unusual among ladies of the South and the Southwest, powdering the nose and chin sharp white and applying circles of rouge to the cheeks. Seen from an end of a long, softly lighted room, Mrs. Ewing was a pretty woman.

She had long been a widowed lady. Even before her widowhood, she and Mr. Ewing had lived separately, while the sympathy of the town dwelt with her. She had dallied with the notion of divorce, for it is well known that the thought, much less the presence, of a merry divorcee sets gentlemen to pawing the ground and snorting. But before her plans took form, Mr. Ewing, always a devout believer in the doctrine of one more for the road, was killed in an automobile accident. Still, a widow, too, a soft little widow, has repute the world over for causing the hearts of gentlemen to beat warm and fast. Mrs. Ewing and her friends felt sure that she would marry again. Time slid on, and this did not happen.

Mrs. Ewing never vaunted her lorn condition, never shut herself within the shaded chambers of bereavement. She went right along, skipping and tinkling through all the social events of the town, and no week went by without her presiding in her own house over cheerful little dinners or evenings of pa.s.sionate bridge. She was always the same, and always the same to everyone, although she reached her heights when there were men present. She coquetted with the solid husbands of her friends, and with the two or three bachelors of the town, tremulous antiques pouring pills into their palms at the dinner table, she was sprightly to the verge of naughtiness. To a stranger observing her might have come the thought that Mrs. Ewing was not a woman who easily abandoned hope.

Mrs. Ewing had a daughter: Lolita. It is, of course, the right of parents to name their offspring what they please, yet it would sometimes be easier if they could glimpse the future and see what the little one was going to look like later on. Lolita was of no color at all; she was thin, with insistent k.n.o.bs at the ends of her bones, and her hair, so fine that it seemed spa.r.s.e, grew straight. There was a time when Mrs. Ewing, probably hostess to fantasies about a curly-headed tot, took to wetting the child"s hair severely and rolling it up on strips of rags when she went to bed. But when the strips were untied in the morning, down fell the hair again, straight as ever. All that came of the project was a series of white nights for Lolita, trying to rest her head on the hard knots of the rags. So the whole thing was given up, and her hair hung as it must thereafter. In her early days at school, the little boys would chase her around the schoolyard at recess, s.n.a.t.c.hing at the limp strands and crying, "Oh, Lolita, give us a curl, w.i.l.l.ya? Ah, Lolita, give us one of your pretty curls!" The little girls, her little friends, would gather in a group to watch and say "Oo, aren"t they terrible?" and press their hands against their mouths to control their giggles.

Mrs. Ewing was always her own sparkling self with her daughter, but her friends, mothers of born belles, tried to imagine themselves in her place and their hearts ached for her. Gallant in their own way, they found cases to relate to her, cases of girls who went through periods of being plain and then turned suddenly into dazzling beauties; some of the more scholarly brought up references to the story of the ugly duckling. But Lolita pa.s.sed through young girlhood and came of age and the only difference in her was that she was taller.

The friends did not dislike Lolita. They spoke sweetly to her and when she was not present always inquired of her mother about her, although knowing there would be no news. Their exasperation was not with her but with the Fates, who had foisted upon Mrs. Ewing that pale gawk-one, moreover, with no spirit, with never a word to say for herself. For Lolita was quiet, so quiet that often you would not realize she was in the room, until the light shone on her gla.s.ses. There was nothing to do about it; there were no hopeful anecdotes to cover the condition. The friends, thinking of their own winging, twittering young, sighed again for Mrs. Ewing.

There were no beaux draped along the railing of the Ewing porch in the evening; no young male voices asked for Lolita over the telephone. At first seldom, then not at all, did the other girls ask her to their parties. This was no mark of dislike; it was only that it was difficult to bear her in mind, since school was done with for all of them and they no longer saw her daily. Mrs. Ewing always had her present at her own little soirees, though the Lord knew she added nothing to them, and, dauntless, took her along to the public events attended by both old and young, festivals for the benefit of church or charity or civic embellishment. Even when brought into such festivities, Lolita would find a corner and stay there in her quiet. Her mother would call to her across the big public room, carolling high and clear above the social clatter: "Well, come on there, little old Miss Stick-in-the-Mud! Get up on your feet and start mixing around with people!" Lolita would only smile and stay where she was, quiet as she was. There was nothing morose about her stillness. Her face, if you remembered to see it, had a look of shy welcoming, and her smile might have been set high in the tiny list of her attractions. But such attributes are valuable only when they can be quickly recognized; who has time to go searching?

It often happens in the instance of an unsought maiden daughter and a gay little mother that the girl takes over the running of the house, lifting the burden from the mother"s plump shoulders. But not Lolita. She had no domestic talents. Sewing was a dark mystery to her, and if she ventured into the kitchen to attempt some simple dish, the results would be, at best, ludicrous. Nor could she set a room in pretty order. Lamps shivered, ornaments shattered, water slopped out of flower vases before her touch. Mrs. Ewing never chided the girl for her clumsiness; she made jokes about it. Lolita"s hands shook under railleries, and there would be only more spilled water and more splintered shepherdesses.

She could not even do the marketing successfully, although armed with a resume of the needs of the day in her mother"s curly handwriting. She would arrive at the market at the proper hour, the time it was filled with women, and then seem to be unable to push her way through them. She stood aside until later arrivals had been served before she could go to the counter and murmur her wants; and so Mrs. Ewing"s lunch would be late. The household would have tottered if it had not been for the maid Mrs. Ewing had had for years-Mardy, the super-cook, the demon cleaner. The other ladies lived uneasily with their servants, ridden with fears that they might either leave or become spoiled, but Mrs. Ewing was cozy with Mardy. She was as vigorously winsome with the maid as with the better-born. They enjoyed laughing together, and right at hand was the subject of Lolita"s incompetences.

Experiments palled, and finally Lolita was relieved of domestic offices. She stayed still and silent; and time went on and Mrs. Ewing went on and on, bright as a bubble in the air.

Then there bloomed a certain spring, not gradually but all in a day, a season long to be referred to as the time John Marble came. The town had not before seen the like of John Marble. He looked as if he had just alighted from the chariot of the sun. He was tall and fair, and he could make no awkward move or utter no stumbling phrase. The girls lost all consciousness of the local young men, for they were nowhere as against John Marble. He was older than they-he had crossed thirty-and he must have been rich, for he had the best room at the Wade Hampton Inn and he drove a low, narrow car with a foreign name, a thing of grace and power. More, there was about him the magic of the transitory. There were the local young men, day after day, year in, year out. But John Marble had come on some real-estate dealings for his firm, some matters of properties outside the town limits, and when his business was done, he would go back to the great, glittering city where he lived. Time pressed; excitement heightened.

Through his business John Marble met important men of the town, the fathers of daughters, and there was eager entertaining for the brilliant stranger. The girls put on the fluffiest white, and tucked bunches of pink roses in their pale-blue sashes; their curls shone and swung like bells. In the twilight they sang little songs for John Marble, and one of them had a guitar. The local young men, whose evenings hung like wet seaweed around their necks, could only go in glum groups to the bowling alley or the moving-picture theater. Though the parties in John Marble"s honor slackened, for he explained that because of the demands of his business he must regret invitations, still the girls impatiently refused appointments to the local young men, and stayed at home alone on the chance of a telephone call from John Marble. They beguiled the time of waiting by sketching his profile on the telephone pad. Sometimes they threw away their training and telephoned him, even as late as ten o"clock at night. When he answered, he was softly courteous, charmingly distressed that his work kept him from being with them. Then, more and more frequently, there was no answer to their calls. The switchboard operator at the inn merely reported that Mr. Marble was out.

Somehow, the difficulties in the way of coming nearer to John Marble seemed to stimulate the girls. They tossed their fragrant curls and let their laughter soar, and when they pa.s.sed the Wade Hampton Inn, they less walked than sashayed. Their elders said that never in their memories had the young girls been so pretty and so spirited as they were that spring.

And with the whole townful of bright blossoms bended for his plucking, John Marble chose Lolita Ewing.

It was a courtship curiously without detail. John Marble would appear at the Ewing house in the evening, with no preliminary telephoning, and he and Lolita would sit on the porch while Mrs. Ewing went out among her friends. When she returned, she shut the gate behind her with a clang, and as she started up the brick path she uttered a loud, arch "A-hem," as if to warn the young people of her coming, so that they might wrench themselves one from the other. But there was never a squeal of the porch swing, never a creak of a floor board-those noises that tell tales of scurryings to new positions. The only sound was of John Marble"s voice, flowing easily along; and when Mrs. Ewing came up on the porch, John Marble would be lying in the swing and Lolita would be sitting in a wicker chair some five feet away from him, with her hands in her lap, and, of course, not a peep out of her. Mrs. Ewing"s conscience would smite her at the knowledge of John Marble"s one-sided evening, and so she would sit down and toss the ball of conversation in the air and keep it there with reports of the plot of the moving picture she had seen or the hands of the bridge game in which she had taken part. When she, even she, came to a pause, John Marble would rise and explain that the next day was to be a hard one for him and so he must go. Mrs. Ewing would stand at the porch steps and as he went down the path would call after him roguish instructions that he was not to do anything that she would not do.

When she and Lolita came in from the dark porch to the lighted hall, Mrs. Ewing would look at her daughter in an entirely new way. Her eyes narrowed, her lips pressed together, and her mouth turned down at the corners. In silence she surveyed the girl, and still in silence not broken by even a good night, she would mount to her bedroom, and the sound of her closing door would fill the house.

The pattern of the evenings changed. John Marble no longer came to sit on the porch. He arrived in his beautiful car and took Lolita driving through the gentle dark. Mrs. Ewing"s thoughts followed them. They would drive out in the country, they would turn off the road to a smooth dell with thick trees to keep it secret from pa.s.sersby, and there the car would stop. And what would happen then? Did they-Would they-But Mrs. Ewing"s thoughts could go no farther. There would come before her a picture of Lolita, and so the thoughts would be finished by her laughter.

All the days, now, she continued to regard the girl under lowered lids, and the downturn of her mouth became a habit with her, though not among her prettier ones. She seldom spoke to Lolita directly, but she still made jokes. When a wider audience was wanting, she called upon Mardy. "Hi, Mardy!" she would cry. "Come on in here, will you? Come in and look at her, sitting there like a queen. Little Miss High-and-Mighty, now she thinks she"s caught her a beau!"

There was no announcement of engagement. It was not necessary, for the town sizzled with the news of John Marble and Lolita Ewing. There were two schools of thought as to the match: one blessed Heaven that Lolita had gained a man and the other mourned the callousness of a girl who could go away and leave her mother alone. But miracles were scarce in the annals of the town, and the first school had the more adherents. There was no time for engagement rites. John Marble"s business was concluded, and he must go back. There were scarcely hours enough to make ready for the wedding.

It was a big wedding. John Marble first suggested, then stated, that his own plan would be for Lolita and him to go off alone, be married, and then start at once for New York; but Mrs. Ewing paid him no heed. "No, sir," she said. "n.o.body"s going to do me out of a great big lovely wedding!" And so n.o.body did.

Lolita in her bridal attire answered her mother"s description of looking like nothing at all. The shiny white fabric of her gown was hostile to her colorless skin, and there was no way to pin the veil becomingly on her hair. But Mrs. Ewing more than made up for her. All in pink ruffles caught up with cl.u.s.ters of false forget-me-nots, Mrs. Ewing was at once bold sunlight and new moonlight, she was budding boughs and opening petals and little, willful breezes. She tripped through the throngs in the smilax-garlanded house, and everywhere was heard her laughter. She patted the bridegroom on arm and cheek, and cried out, to guest after guest, that for two cents she would marry him herself. When the time came to throw rice after the departing couple, she was positively devil-may-care. Indeed, so extravagant was her pitching that one hard-packed handful of the sharp little grains. .h.i.t the bride squarely in the face.

But when the car was driven off, she stood still looking after it, and there came from her downturned mouth a laugh not at all like her usual trill. "Well," she said, "we"ll see." Then she was Mrs. Ewing again, running and chirping and urging more punch on her guests.

Lolita wrote to her mother every week without fail, telling of her apartment and the buying and placing of furniture and the always new adventure of shopping; each letter concluded with the information that John hoped Mrs. Ewing was well and sent her his love. The friends eagerly inquired about the bride, wanting to know above all if she was happy. Mrs. Ewing replied that well, yes, she said she was. "That"s what I tell her every time I write to her," she said. "I say, "That"s right, honey, you go ahead and be happy just as long as you can." "

It cannot be said in full truth that Lolita was missed in the town; but there was something lacking in the Ewing house, something lacking in Mrs. Ewing herself. Her friends could not actually define what it was, for she went on as always, flirting the skirts of her little dresses and trying on her little hair ribbons, and there was no slowing of her movements. Still, the glister was not quite so golden. The dinners and the bridge games continued, but somehow they were not as they had been.

Yet the friends must realize she had taken a stunning blow, for Mardy left her; left her, if you please, for the preposterous project of getting married; Mardy, after all the years and all Mrs. Ewing"s goodness to her. The friends shook their heads, but Mrs. Ewing, after the first shock, could be gay about it. "I declare," she said, and her laugh spiralled out, "everybody around me goes off and gets married. I"m just a regular little old Mrs. Cupid." In the long line of new maids there were no Mardys; the once cheerful little dinners were gloomy with grease.

Mrs. Ewing made several journeys to see her daughter and son-in-law, bearing gifts of black-eyed peas and tins of herring roe, for New Yorkers do not know how to live and such delicacies are not easily obtained up North. Her visits were widely s.p.a.ced; there was a stretch of nearly a year between two of them, while Lolita and John Marble travelled in Europe and then went to Mexico. ("Like hens on hot griddles," Mrs. Ewing said. "People ought to stay put.") Each time she came back from New York, her friends gathered about her, clamoring for reports. Naturally, they quivered for news of oncoming babies. There was none to tell them. There was never any issue of those golden loins and that plank of a body. "Oh, it"s just as well," Mrs. Ewing said comfortably, and left the subject there.

John Marble and Lolita were just the same, the friends were told.

John Marble was as devastating as he had been when he first came to the town, and Lolita still had not a word to say for herself. Though her tenth wedding anniversary was coming close, she could not yet give shape to her dresses. She had closets of expensive clothes-when Mrs. Ewing quoted the prices of some of the garments, the friends sucked in their breath sharply-but when she put on a new dress it might as well have been the old one. They had friends, and they entertained quite nicely, and they sometimes went out. Well, yes, they did seem so; they really did seem happy.

"It"s just like I tell Lolita," Mrs. Ewing said. "Just like I always say to her when I write: "You go ahead and be happy as long as you can." Because-Well, you know. A man like John Marble married to a girl like Lolita! But she knows she can always come here. This house is her home. She can always come back to her mother."

For Mrs. Ewing was not a woman who easily abandoned hope.

The New Yorker, August 27, 1955.

The Banquet of Crow.

It was a crazy year, a year when things that should have run on schedule went all which ways. It was a year when snow fell thick and lasting in April, and young ladies clad in shorts were photographed for the tabloids sunbathing in Central Park in January. It was a year when, in the greatest prosperity of the richest nation, you could not walk five city blocks without being besought by beggars; when expensively dressed women loud and lurching in public places were no uncommon sight; when drugstore counters were stacked with tablets to make you tranquil and other tablets to set you leaping. It was a year when wives whose position was only an inch or two below that of the saints-arbiters of etiquette, venerated hostesses, architects of memorable menus-suddenly caught up a travelling bag and a jewel case and flew off to Mexico with ambiguous young men allied with the arts; when husbands who had come home every evening not only at the same hour but at the same minute of the same hour came home one evening more, spoke a few words, and then went out their doors and did not come in by them again.

If Guy Allen had left his wife at another period, she would have held the enduring interest of her friends. But in that year of lunacy so many marital barks were piled up on Norman"s Woe that the friends had become overly familiar with tales of shipwreck. At first they flocked to her side and did their practiced best to medicine her wound. They clicked their tongues in sorrow and shook their heads in bewilderment; they diagnosed the case of Guy Allen as one of insanity; they made blistering generalizations about men, considered as a tribe; they a.s.sured Maida Allen that no woman could have done more for a man and been more to a man; they pressed her hand and promised her, "Oh, he"ll come back-you"ll see!"

But time went on, and so did Mrs. Allen, who never in her life before had been known to keep to a subject-on and on with her story of the desperate wrong that had been done her, and she so blameless. Her friends had no energy left to interpolate coos of condolence into the recital, for they were weak with hearing it-it, and others like it; it is the terrible truth that the sagas of the deserted are deplorably lacking in variety. There came a day, indeed, when one lady slammed down her teacup, sprang to her feet, and shrieked, "For Christ"s sake, Maida, talk about something else!"

Mrs. Allen saw no more of that lady. She began to see less and less of her other friends, too, though that was their doing, not hers. They took no pride in their dereliction; they were troubled by the lurking knowledge that the most ruthless bore may still be genuinely in anguish.

They tried-each tried once-inviting her to pleasant little dinners, to take her out of herself. Mrs. Allen brought her King Charles"s head right along with her, and stuck it up, so to say, in the middle of the table, a grisly centerpiece. Several male guests, strangers to her, were provided. In their good humor at meeting a new and pretty woman, they made small flirtatious sorties. Her return was to admit them to her tragedy, going on, past the salad and through the Mocha mousse, with her list of proven talents as wife, chum, and lover, and pointing out, with cynical laughter, just where those had got her. When the guests were gone, the hostess miserably accepted the host"s ultimatum on who was not to be asked again.

They did invite her, though, to their big c.o.c.ktail parties, the grand mop-ups of social obligations, thinking that Mrs. Allen could not pit her soft voice against the almighty noise of such galas and so her troubles, unspoken, might be for a while unthought of. Mrs. Allen, on her entrance, went by straight line to acquaintances who had known her and her husband together, and inquired of them if they had seen anything of Guy. If they said they had, she asked them how he was. If they said, "Why, fine," she tendered them a forgiving smile and pa.s.sed on. Her friends gave up the whole thing.

Mrs. Allen resented their behavior. She lumped them all together as creatures who could function in fair weather only, and uttered thanks that she had found them out in time-in time for what, she did not state. But there was no one to question her, for she spoke to herself. She had begun the practice while pacing the silent rooms of her apartment until deep into the night, and presently she carried it with her out to the street, on her daily walk. It was a year when there were many along the sidewalks mouthing soliloquies, and unless they talked loud and made gestures other pedestrians did not turn to look.

It was a month, then two months, then nearly four, and she had had no direct word from Guy Allen. A day or so after his departure, he had telephoned the apartment and, first inquiring about the health of the maid who answered (he was always the ideal of servants), had asked that his mail be forwarded to his club, where he would be staying. Later that day, he sent the club valet to gather his clothes, pack them, and fetch them to him. These incidents occurred while Mrs. Allen was out; there had been no mention of her, either to the maid or through the valet, and that made a bad time for her. Still, she told herself, at least she knew where he was. She did not pursue the further thought that at most she knew where he was.

On the first of each month, she received a check, in the amount it had always been, for household expenses and herself. The rent must have been sent to the owner of the apartment building, for she was never asked for it. The checks did not come to her from Guy Allen; they were enclosed in notes from his banker, a courtly, white-haired gentleman, whose communications gave the effect of having been written with a quill. Aside from the checks, there was nothing to indicate that Guy and Maida Allen were husband and wife.

Her present became intolerable to Mrs. Allen, and she could see her future only as a hideous prolonging of it. She turned to the past. She did not let memory lead her; it was she who steered memory back along the sunny bypaths of her marriage. Eleven years of marriage, years of happiness-perfect happiness. Oh, Guy had had a man"s little moods sometimes, but she could always smile him out of them, and such minute happenings only brought them more sweetly together; lovers" quarrels wax the way to bed. Mrs. Allen shed April tears for times gone by; and n.o.body ever came along and explained to her that if she had had eleven years of perfect happiness, she was the only human being who ever did.

But memory is a tacit companion. Silence banged on Mrs. Allen"s ears. She wanted to hear gentle voices, especially her own. She wanted to find understanding-that thing so many spend their lives in seeking, though surely it should be easy to come upon, for what is it but mutual praise and pity? Her friends had let her down; then she must collect others. It is surprisingly difficult to a.s.semble a fresh circle. It cost Mrs. Allen time and trouble to track down ladies of old acquaintance, which for years she had succeeded in never bringing to mind, and to trace fellow-travellers once pleasantly met with on shipboard and in planes. However, she had some responses, and there followed intimate sessions at her apartment in the afternoons.

They were unsatisfactory. The ladies brought her not understanding but exhortation. They told her to buck up, to pull herself together, to get on her toes; one of them actually slapped her on the back. The sessions came to take on much of the character of the fight talk in the locker room between the halves of the big game, and when it was finally urged that she tell Guy Allen to go to h.e.l.l, Mrs. Allen discontinued them.

Yet good came of them, for it was through one of the benighted advisers that Mrs. Allen met Dr. Langham.

Though Dr. Marjorie Langham earned her own living, she had lost none of her femininity-doubtless because she had never trod the b.l.o.o.d.y halls of medical school or strained her bright eyes studying for an M.D. With one graceful leap she had landed on her slender feet as a healer of troubled minds. It was a year when the couches of such healers had not time to grow cool between patients. Dr. Langham was enormously successful.

She was full of anecdotes about her patients. She had her own way of telling them, so that the case histories not only were killingly comic in themselves but gave you, the listener, the fine feeling that you weren"t so crazy after all. On her deeper side, she was a woman of swift comprehensions, and of firm sympathy with the hard lot of sensitive members of her s.e.x. She was made for Mrs. Allen.

Mrs. Allen did not go direct to the couch on her first visit to Dr. Langham. In the office filled with chintzes and cheer, she and the Doctor sat opposite each other, woman and woman; Mrs. Allen found it easier that way to pour forth all. The Doctor, during the relating of Guy Allen"s outrageous behavior, nodded repeatedly; when she was told, on request, Guy Allen"s age, she wore an amused little smile. "Well, of course, that"s what it is," she said. "Oh, those middle forties! That dear old dangerous age! Why, that"s all that"s the matter with him-he"s going through the change."

Mrs. Allen pounded her temples with her fists, for being such a fool as not to have thought of that before. There she had been weeping and wailing because it had completely slipped her mind that men, too, are born into the world with the debt of original sin laid on them; Guy Allen, as must everyone else, had reached the age of paying it; there was the whole matter. (In the last two cases of broken marriages of which Mrs. Allen had heard, that year, one of the outgoing husbands was twenty-nine and the other sixty-two, but she did not recall them to memory.) The Doctor"s explanation so relieved Mrs. Allen that she went and lay down on the couch.

"That"s the girl-relax," Dr. Langham said. "Oh, all the poor women, the poor idiot women! Tearing their hearts out, beating themselves with their "Why, why, why?"s, breaking their necks to find a fancy reason for it when their husbands walk out, when it"s just the traditional case of temporarily souped-up nerves and the routine change in metabolism."

The Doctor gave Mrs. Allen books to take home with her, to read before her next appointment; some of their authors, she said, were close friends of hers, women recognized as authorities on their subject. The books were written, as if by one pen, in a fluid, conversational style, comfortable for laymen. There was a sameness about their contents; each was a collection of instances of married men who had rushed out from their beds and boards in mad revolt against middle age. The revolts, as such, were rather touching. The wild-eyed mobs were without plan or direction, the nights were bitter cold, they sickened for home. Back came the revolutionaries, one after one, with hanging heads and supplicating palms, back to their wise, kind wives.

Mrs. Allen was impressed by these works. She came upon many a pa.s.sage which, if the books had belonged to her, she would have underscored heavily.

She felt that she might properly be listed among those wives who waited at home, so kind, so wise. She could say, in all humility, that many people had told her she was almost too kind for her own good, and she could point to an act of true wisdom. In the first black days of her misery, she had sworn an oath to herself that she would make no move toward Guy Allen: Might her right hand wither and drop off if she employed it to dial his telephone number! No one could count the number of miles she had walked, up and down her carpets, fighting to hold to her vow. She did it, but the sight of her saved right hand, fresh and fair, brought no comfort to her; it simply reminded her of the use to which it might have been put. From there, she thought of another hand on another dial, always with new pain that Guy Allen had never called her.

Dr. Langham gave her high marks for keeping away from the telephone, and brushed aside her grief at Guy Allen"s silence.

"Certainly he hasn"t called you," she said. "Exactly as I expected-yes, and the best sign we"ve had that he"s doing a little suffering on his own hook. He"s afraid to talk to you. He"s ashamed of himself. He knows what he did to you-he doesn"t know why he did it, the way we do, but he knows what a terrible thing it was. He"s doing a lot of thinking about you. His not daring to call you up shows that."

It was a big factor in Dr. Langham"s success that she had the ability to make wet straws seem like st.u.r.dy logs to the nearly submerged.

Maida Allen"s cure was not effected in a day. It was several weeks before she was whole. She gave all credit to her doctor. Dr. Langham, by simply switching the cold light of science on the reason for Guy Allen"s apparent desertion, had given her back to herself. She was no more the lone, lorn creature, rejected like a faded flower, a worn glove, a stretched garter. She was a woman brave and humane, waiting, with the patience that was her crown jewel, for her poor, muddled man to get through his little indisposition and come home to her to be cheered through convalescence and speeded to recovery. Daily, on Dr. Langham"s couch, talking and listening, she gained in strength. She slept through the nights, and when she went out to the street, her straight back and her calm, bright face made her seem like a visitor from a fairer planet, among those of the bowed shoulders and the twitching mouths who thronged the pavements.

The miracle happened. Her husband telephoned to her. He asked if he might come to the apartment that evening to pick up a suitcase that he wanted. She suggested that he come to dinner. He was afraid he couldn"t do that; he had to dine early with a client, but he would come about nine o"clock. If she was not going to be at home, would she please to leave the suitcase with Jessie, the maid. She said it was the one night in she didn"t know how long that she was not going out. Fine, he said, then he"d see her later; and rang off.

Mrs. Allen was early for her doctor"s appointment. She gave Dr. Langham the news in a sort of carol. The Doctor nodded, and her amused smile broadened until virtually all of her exceptionally handsome teeth showed.

"So there you are," she said. "And there he is. And who is the one that told you so? Now listen to me. This is important-maybe the most important part of your whole treatment. Don"t lose your head tonight. Remember that this man has put one of the most sensitive creatures I ever saw in my life through h.e.l.l. Don"t soften up. Don"t fall all over him, as if he was doing you a favor coming back to you. Don"t be too easy on him."

"Oh-h-h, I won"t!" Mrs. Allen said. "Guy Allen will eat crow!"

"That"s the girl," Dr. Langham said. "Don"t make any scene, you know; but don"t let him think that all is forgiven. Just be cool and sweet. Don"t let him know that you"ve missed him for a moment. Just let him see what he"s been missing. And for G.o.d"s sake, don"t ask him to stay all night."

"Not for anything on this earth," Mrs. Allen said. "If that"s what he wants, he"ll ask me. Yes, and on his knees!"

The apartment looked charming; Mrs. Allen saw to it that it did, and saw that she did herself. She bought ma.s.ses of flowers on her way home from the Doctor"s, and arranged them exquisitely-she had always been good at that-all about the living room.

He rang the bell at three minutes past nine. Mrs. Allen had let the maid off that evening. She opened the door to him herself.

"Hi!" she said.

"h.e.l.lo, there," he said. "How are you?"

"Oh, simply fine," she said. "Come on in. I think you know the way, don"t you?"

He followed her into the living room. He held his hat in his hand, and carried his coat over his arm.

"You"ve got a lot of flowers," he said. "Pretty."

"Yes, aren"t they lovely?" she said. "Everybody"s been so kind to me. Let me take your things."

"I can stay just a minute," he said. "I"m meeting a man at the club."

"Oh, that"s too bad," she said.

There was a pause. He said, "You"re looking fine, Maida."

"I can"t imagine why," she said. "I"m about to drop in my tracks. I"ve been going out day and night."

"It agrees with you," he said.

"Notice anything new in this room?" she said.

"Why-I said about all the flowers," he said. "Is there something else?"

"The curtains, the curtains," she said. "New last week."

"Oh, yes," he said. "They look great. Pink."

"Rose," she said. "The room does look nice with them, don"t you think?"

"Great," he said.

"How"s your room at the club?" she said.

"It"s all right," he said. "I have everything I want."

"Everything?" she said.

"Oh, sure," he said.

"How"s the food?" she said.

"Pretty good now," he said. "Much better than it used to be. They"ve got a new chef."

"What fun!" she said. "So you really like it, living at the club?"

"Oh, yes," he said. "I"m very comfortable there."

"Why don"t you sit down," she said, "and tell me what was the matter with it here? Food? Shaving mirror? What?"

"Why, everything was fine," he said. "Look, Maida, I"ve really got to run. Is my bag here?"

"It"s in your closet in the bedroom, where it always was," she said. "Sit down-I"ll get it for you."