1
ROSE-ANN had become restless again. Once more she threatened to go out
and get a job. Books no longer contented her; and if she had secretly
cherished, as Felix had thought, some dreams of writing, they had
vanished, like her notebook, which was no more to be seen. They gave
wild parties, extended the number of their friends, and went to
dinner-parties, where Rose-Ann shone as always, and even Felix began to
be able to take care of himself. She went to the theatre with Felix and
took down his criticisms on her typewriter from dictation, as she had a
year ago. But these activities did not quite content her volatile
spirit.
Her restlessness expressed itself, delightfully enough, in a resumption
of the endless midnight talks which had marked the first period of their
married intimacy. Their daylight hours together now seemed never to
suffice them for talking. Those hours were too filled up with work, and
play, and friends. During the day a thousand ideas, observations,
comments, stories, had been stored away by each for the other’s benefit.
A glance at dinner had meant: “Did you see that? Yes—we’ll talk about it
tonight.” In these gatherings, however friendly and outspoken, something
was always left unsaid, reserved especially for each other. The heart of
every occasion was in its midnight aftermath, in the long wakeful hours
in bed, remembering, criticizing, laughing, talking, talking....
Marriage had come to mean above all else the peculiar magic of that
intimacy. Sometimes her voice would come mysteriously out of the dark at
his side, and again the moonlight would creep in over the roofs and
tease the scene with its glamour. Their beds, in summer two little oases
of coolness in the sultry night, became in winter warm-coverleted
citadels against the cold—two little friendly islands, with two voices
floating pleasantly back and forth. “Light me another cigarette,”
Rose-Ann would say sleepily. Tired, but kept awake by all they had to
tell each other, the mere thoughts and incidents of the day made
precious by this re-living of them together, they lay and talked out
their hearts.
2
“Felix strikes me as rather paintable. Could you spare him a few
afternoons for a sitting now and then? I mean, some time this winter?
I’m getting interested in doing portraits again.”
“I’d love to have you!”
Dorothy Sheridan had come back from her fishing village, and a little
trip abroad to boot, and she and the Fays were dining in a little
restaurant to which she had taken them—not very far from their studio, a
little Italian place frequented by artists, where the food was good and
the prices low. The men one saw there wore soft collars, like Felix’s
own, sometimes turned up to flare about the chin, sometimes open at the
neck; one of the girls at the tables wore a Russian smock, like Dorothy
Sheridan, and all of them seemed, like her, comfortably uncorseted. They
all seemed to know each other, and each new person who came greeted the
whole roomful. It was a friendly place.
Felix was rather amused at having his afternoons asked for and given
away without his being consulted. But he was flattered by the
invitation. He had never been painted, and he considered it a
distinction.
“It will be a bore,” Dorothy warned him. “You’ll get awfully tired of it
before I’m through. But I’ll do you in half a dozen sittings, I promise
you, or give it up. Give him a cup of coffee, before he comes. I don’t
talk to my subjects, and they are likely to fall asleep!”
They had been to Dorothy Sheridan’s studio that afternoon, and looked at
her paintings and sketches. The paintings were, with one or two
exceptions, in a vivid, splashing style that Felix liked. “I’ve changed
my style since going to Paris,” she said. “These things are what they
call over there Post-Impressionist. I’ll do you in my best
Cezanne-Matisse manner, Felix, with some variations all my own. You
won’t know yourself!”
Rose-Ann had been most impressed by some of Dorothy’s old sketches,
particularly a series of lovely nudes done in pencil with a hard,
vibrant line. Dorothy picked one of them out and gave it to Rose-Ann.
“Here’s one that looks like you,” she said, appraising Rose-Ann’s figure
with a judicious eye. “You can use it for a book-plate if you like.”
It was like Rose-Ann, Felix thought, when she pinned it on the wall that
night—it had the same firm and delicate contours, the same sweet
livingness of a body that is made for movement, for action, for intense
and poignant use. The figure in the drawing was poised in the hesitant
instant before flight, with head turned to look backward, and the whole
body ready at the next moment either to relapse again into reassured
repose or to put all its force into some wild dash for freedom. And
somehow that too reminded him of Rose-Ann—of Rose-Ann’s soul.
Rose-Ann was looking at the picture with eyes in which some purpose
fulminated darkly.
“What are you thinking?” he asked.
“That I shall never wear corsets again! It’s really absurd, isn’t it? To
imprison one’s body in such a thing as that.... I’m going to burn mine
up—now!” And presently, in her chemise and stockings, she solemnly knelt
before the Franklin stove and laid the offending article upon the live
coals.
“The last of my conventions!” she said, as if to herself.
And then, as it commenced to smoulder, and an acrid odour of burnt
rubber emerged, she wrinkled her nostrils and put her thumb and finger
to them. “It thmells bad!” she said. And reflectively: “I suppose
conventions always do, at the end.... Well, it’s gone now, and my body
is free.—Gone forever, leaving nothing but a ... faint unpleasant odour,
shall I say?—behind.... Felix—would you mind if I cut off my hair?”
“Cut off—!”
“Short, you know. Like Dorothy Sheridan’s. I’ve always wanted to. And I
never quite had the nerve. Living here, it seems only natural. You
wouldn’t mind?”
She loosened her hair and it fell about her shoulders, like a flame. “I
think it would curl if it were cut. It did when I was a little girl.”
“We’ve no scissors,” said Felix, practically—deferring in his own mind
the question of whether he would like her hair cut short or not. He did
not know. It would look well—there was no doubt at all of that. He had
always wondered at the foolish vanity of women, in putting up with the
inconvenience of long hair. He had felt that long hair was in some way a
badge of woman’s dependence on man, a symbol of her failure to achieve
freedom for herself. And yet ... when it came to Rose-Ann’s hair—
Rose-Ann read his face as a wife can. “No, I suppose not,” she said, and
sighed. “No scissors! Well, there’s always something to prevent one from
being rash. In the morning I shan’t want to—because I’m going out to
look for a job....”
Felix smiled. “Wolf! wolf!” he mocked gently. He had heard that threat
of a job too often to be alarmed about it now.
“You’ll see,” said Rose-Ann gaily.
3
Felix was accustomed, by masculine prerogative, to get up first on cold
mornings and shake down the fire and make the coffee. But this morning,
having dreamed that he had arisen and performed these duties (a very
realistic dream—he had heard the noise of the poker among the coals and
smelled the fragrance of hot coffee!) he awoke to see Rose-Ann coming
toward him with a cup and saucer, on a lacquered tray.
“Your morning draught, my lord!”
“Rose-Ann!” he said angrily. She should have let him make that
coffee....
She knelt and offered him the cup, with the air of a page-boy. Then it
was that he saw that her hair was shorn. Short bronze locks fell
clustering about her face in tiny curls, making it boyish, and yet, it
seemed, more girlish than ever. She turned sideways as he stared, and
tilted her head. For the first time its proud contour stood fully and
beautifully revealed. “Isn’t that better than an old top-knot?” she
said.
“But how—” he began.
“Borrowed scissors from neighbour,” she replied. “What are neighbours
for, if not to depend on in an emergency?”
“Why is this an emergency?” he demanded, still withholding his approval.
“Couldn’t you wait and go to the barber?” Some of the edges, he noted,
were rather jagged.
“No, Felix. Don’t you remember Browning’s poem about the Statue and the
Bust? One puts off things. ‘So days grew months, years.’ Moral: do it
now.—But do you like me this way, Felix?”
“Of course I like you.” And then, since he did, he added:
“Tremendously!”
“You—you approve?”
“Yes, but what of that? Can’t you do what you like whether I approve or
not? Aren’t you a free woman?” he teased her.
“That’s what I said to myself. And so I did it. But—I’m glad you like
it, Felix, because—because I’m not sure whether I do or not!”
He laughed. “It will grow again.”
“No—I shan’t let it grow again. I’m going to like it, I know—eventually;
perhaps very soon. It’s just at first.... But I suppose that’s the way
with freedom!... Drink your coffee, Felix, before it gets cold. I’ll
bring mine over there, too. Do you love me—very much? Look out—you’ll
spill the coffee!”
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