1
ROSE-ANN left for Los Angeles during the Christmas holidays. During the
month that had elapsed before her departure, Felix had been to see her
several times a week.... There is something disconcerting in finding
oneself treated by one’s wife as a new acquaintance—in a politely
friendly manner, quite as she treats any other guest. He had gone away
more than once secretly enraged, swearing that he would not go again; at
other times it seemed to him a prodigious joke.
To knock at the door of his own studio; to sit as a guest upon a chair
he had painted with his own hands; that was sufficiently strange. To
invite formally to dinner—in order not to be merely one of several of
her friends and admirers, in order to have a word with her alone—the
girl with whom one has talked all night more nights than one could
remember: that was stranger still. But to be met at the door, when you
came to your studio a little early to escort her to that dinner, by a
rather shy startled figure in a scarlet dressing gown well-known to you,
but now clasped with firm fingers at her bosom, and asked to wait before
the fire while she finished dressing behind the screen at the back, in a
tone which cancelled utterly the countless intimacies that you have
shared—that was the strangest of all.... Was it any wonder that, having
thus achieved the opportunity for a word or two alone with her he should
have found it impossible to say any words whatever except such as would
be appropriate addressed to a young woman with whom one stood on such a
footing? One might talk to her seriously about ideas, or lightly about
friends; one might be argumentative or witty; one might pay her
compliments, even equivocal and daring compliments, of whose double
meaning she would seem unconscious; one might, in short, pay court to
her as one might to a hundred others.