1
“THERE’S a light burning in your studio,” she said as they turned the
corner. They had been silent all the way, Phyllis happy to be out in the
moonlight, and Felix rather moodily uneasy at this prolongation of an
incident that had already had its due ending.
“Yes, Rose-Ann is still up,” he said.
He unlocked the door, and Phyllis ran in eagerly. Rose-Ann sprang up
from the table where she had been working over some magazine proofs.
“Phyllis!” she cried, and the two girls embraced like old friends long
parted.
“I’ve been keeping Felix up, listening to the story of my life,” said
Phyllis.
“Is it late? I’ve been fixing up the dummy of the Motion Picture World.
I’m just finished. I have to get it down at the printer’s at eight in
the morning.” She went over to the table, and swept the scattered proofs
into a portfolio, laying the dummy upon them, and tying the strings.
“How about some coffee? Or are you sleepy?” “Wide awake!” said Phyllis.
“It’s so nice to find you up. I did want to see your studio.”
“Felix, will you make some coffee?”
Felix came back in a moment and sadly reported that the coffee was “all
gone!”
“Oh, I forgot—I used the last of it this evening.... What a pity!”
Felix, returning into their presence from behind the screen, had a
curious sense of being a third, an intruder into a friendly intimacy. He
had had, in the very moment of their meeting, a startled impression of
their being the oldest friends each other had, far more deeply
acquainted with each other than he with either of them! And now, in the
mere two minutes in which he had been out of their sight searching for
coffee, they had begun to talk for all the world like two old
schoolmates who had, after a long separation, much to tell each other.
His entrance had, or so it seemed to him, the effect of an interruption.
“I’ll look again,” he said awkwardly. “There may be some left of that G.
Washington coffee. I think there is.” And he went behind the screen
again.
There was no “G. Washington coffee.” He found the empty can at once. But
he sat down on the bed, grinning sheepishly at himself, instead of
returning. He could hear them out there talking in the swift,
breathless, low tones of confidential feminine narrative. Now Phyllis’s
voice ceased on a note of inquiry, and Rose-Ann spoke without
interruption to a hushed listener. Her voice became louder, and there
was a ring of pride in it. Both girls suddenly laughed and then Rose-Ann
went on talking....
What on earth could they be talking about? Felix found himself listening
curiously, with decidedly the feeling of an eavesdropper, but he could
distinguish only an unrevealing word or two now and then. “Clive’s
house,” he heard, and after a while, “scissors,” followed by another
laugh; but that was all.
If someone had assured him, beforehand, that Rose-Ann, in spite of what
had seemed to him an ungenerous hostility to Phyllis, would have
instantly taken her to her bosom like this, he would have been pleased;
but now, with that fact before him, he was not so much pleased as
astonished. He was even a little annoyed.
Why should he be annoyed? It was doubtless natural enough for these two
girls to want to talk together. Phyllis’s having been at Rose-Ann’s
wedding constituted a bond between them.... And Felix remembered that
when they had first met they had seemed to like each other at once. He
was behaving rather ridiculously in staying out here; they could talk
just as well in his presence.
He returned to them and again reported failure. And once more, as he
entered, he had the feeling of being an intruder. This time it was as if
they had forgotten his existence, and were rather startled to find him
there, and puzzled for a moment to know how to get rid of him!
“Oh!” said Rose-Ann to his news of the total absence of any coffee
whatever.
“I’ve some coffee over at my place,” said Phyllis. “Won’t you come over
there? I’d like to show you my room. And we can talk.”
Distinctly her glance at him told Felix that he was not wanted along.
Rose-Ann jumped up. “Let’s!” she said. And then to Felix, “you needn’t
bother to come with us. Phyllis and I want to talk.”
“All right!” he said, smiling. But as he saw them depart together out of
the door of the studio into the moonlight, he had an odd feeling of
being a little boy left out of the conversation of his elders.... And
perhaps, too, there was a strange feeling of jealous unease.
2
He took a book, went to bed, and tried to read himself to sleep. But at
six o’clock he was still awake, and Rose-Ann had not returned. At seven
he rose, and went—well, perhaps not exactly to look for her, but to his
work-room.
Through the inner door he could hear their voices, in animated
conversation. He went to the door, flung it open, and cried,
“My God, are you girls still talking!”
They looked up, startled, and then laughed. “What time is it?” asked
Rose-Ann. “I’ve been telling Phyllis the history of our marriage....”
So that was what they were talking about! Half-appeased, at having been
after all included in the conversation, he looked at his watch.
“Seven-thirty,” he said.
“I have to have my dummy at the printer’s at eight,” said Rose-Ann. “I
wonder if you will take it there for me, Felix, while I take a bath. And
we’ll all meet at breakfast. Clive and Phyllis are going to have
breakfast at Henrici’s, and we’ll join them. Will you?”
Felix went back to the studio for the dummy. As he went, he carried in
his mind the picture he had seen when he opened the door of Phyllis’s
room—Phyllis sitting on the floor at Rose-Ann’s feet precisely as a few
hours earlier she had sat at his, with what must have been the same
worshipful expression on her face as she listened to Rose-Ann’s words.
Rose-Ann had also probably been deciding her young destinies for her.
Felix laughed. It was certainly odd enough!
Yes, but what ideas had Rose-Ann been putting into her head? What kind
of story had Rose-Ann told her about their marriage? Had Rose-Ann talked
about their mutual “freedom”? That theme would have accounted for
Phyllis’s rapt and devout attention. It was what Phyllis wanted to hear,
what she wanted to believe—that love could be like that!
Anyway, he was glad that Phyllis and Rose-Ann were friends.
3
The four of them breakfasted together at Henrici’s, and at noon Phyllis
was inducted into the magic circle of their mid-day comradeship at the
corner table in the little Hungarian restaurant; and that afternoon they
took the train for Woods Point—whither Phyllis had to go as it were in
disguise, or at least stealthily, for her family must not know that she
was spending the night at Clive’s: an ironic precaution, for their
relations were still as vexatiously and chastely intellectual as they
had been in the earliest days of their clandestine meetings.
In spite of their need of sleep—and fortified by the thought that
tomorrow was Sunday and they could sleep as long as they liked—they sat
up until all hours, talking. It was like a reunion, and the memory of
their first meeting here touched it with romantic suggestion. The
promise of comradeship which had been implicit in that first meeting,
obscured at the time by the anxieties and discomforts of a tribal
ceremonial, had now, after so long an interval, come true. They felt
that they had discovered each other, to a new extent, in this new
grouping. It is not often that two couples can happily coalesce into
that infinitely fluid and various arrangement, a group of four. But it
had quite unmistakably and thrillingly happened!
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