It read, “Here is a cheque for the last month’s rent downtown. I don’t
plan to make further contribution to your support. Of course, if you are
starving or anything, call me up and I’ll send you a few meals. But I
imagine you’ll get on all right. Your sort does. I am living for the
moment at the Wilton Arms Hotel. Better address me at the office,
though. How about letting me have some furniture when I take an
apartment? Have a nice time. Peter.”
“Succinct young man,” said Lucia, and hesitated a minute. Then, “I’ve
been hearing this and that about him, Pat.”
“All right, tell me,” I said. I had wondered about that. During the week
or two when we had been moving, Lucia had experimented a bit with a
tentative “he might come back, Patricia, you don’t want to feel
hopeless,” attitude; and had then shifted definitely to the “it’s all
over, but someday you may be glad it is,” point of view.
Lucia said: “I made inquiries. That’s a long story. Everyone’s always
advising a woman separated from her husband. Dozens of people advise me.
Some were helpful, some anything but. I didn’t want to press you into
talk about him—it might distress you too much—but I thought since I’d
taken you on more or less, I’d better find out what the situation was,
if I could, so that I shouldn’t advise you badly.”
“You are an angel, Lucia. Tell me, really, though, why you bother.”
“Several reasons. Wanted to live with someone, knew you’d be fun when
you convalesce somewhat, and you are a type that contrasts with mine
beautifully. I mean you’re black haired and vivacious (normally) and
petite, and I’m long and languorous and red-blonde. Beside, someone did
as much by me, while I was in the state you’re in, and that’s sort of a
bill I wanted to pay somewhere. . . . All that’s irrelevant. You told me
all about that Hilda business . . . but where does this Judith woman
come in? I found out through a girl who knows a man on Pete’s paper,
that he’s seen about with her every night in the week.”
“Something must have happened about Hilda,” I contributed. I felt
miserable again. I was having a very bad time, trying not to speculate
where Peter was, and with whom, and what he was doing, in every quiet
half hour I had, anyway.
“You are bright, Pat. Sorry; I don’t want to tease you. . . . Anyway,
before I heard that, I thought your beloved was likely to get enough of
his Hilda in a few weeks, and turn up wiser . . . and content for a
while. You do seem to be crazy about him, and in spite of the awful time
you’ve both been having, a great reconciliation scene might well have
been managed.”
She stretched out an amazingly white arm for a piece of Turkish paste,
nibbled it with a few words about thanking God she was thin enough to
eat as much candy as she liked, and looked at me to see if I were on the
verge of tears or anything.
“That’s a nice Chinese kimona you’ve got, Pat,” she went on. I laughed.
I was getting used to Lucia’s irrelevancies. They meant “If this
conversation is bothering you, we’ll talk about something else,
instantly.”
“That’s a grand green negligee you’ve got, darling,” I said. “Go on. I
don’t mind talking to you about Pete. In fact, it helps, rather. I told
him I’d never divorce him, but I begin to feel that I’m a rather low
person to stick to that, if he really wants a divorce.”
“Yes,” said Lucia, “we all grow sensible, but it takes time. . . . What
I meant about Judith was, that if ‘something has happened about Hilda’
as you put it, and he’s gone on to Jude, instead of coming back to you
. . . my child, you may as well go see a lawyer now as next year.”
(I thought, “Not yet; I won’t let go yet; I can fill in time, while I
have hope it’s just an entr’acte to be spent, but not otherwise.”)
Lucia went on: “Men . . . men are always coming back from little
excursion trips—but once they start on world cruises. . . .”
“Judith’s no world cruise. She isn’t as nice, really, as Hilda, or as
good-looking.”
“I’ll talk about her in a minute. About the excursions and cruises—I
mean that a man, really in love with one woman, often can go tripping
off blithely but briefly with another, simply because she has a stirring
voice or wide innocent eyes. He comes back, then, to _the_ woman, no
worse off, sometimes improved, even. But once he embarks on a tour,
child, he’s going to stop at so many ports he will forget perhaps, what
city he started from, and certainly what that city had that was unique,
among all the scenery he’s seen since. Your Peter seems to be sailing on
and on, Pat.”
“I can’t believe it yet, Lucia.”
She was, immediately, sympathetic. “Of course not. Don’t try, either. I
might be wrong, and anyway, the only use for advice is to put it in your
pocket and save until, if ever, you feel like taking it. . . . You’ve
met Judith?”
“At the office, several times—she’s gone in for being a stylist since
she got her divorce, you know. And once on a party.”
“Do you like her?”
“No. . . . But I wouldn’t anyway, now. I’m afraid I’m a very jealous
person, Lucia.”
“Everybody is, and everybody poses as not being. . . . I don’t like
Judith either, but she has her points. Do you mind if I go into that,
because I’d like to explain why I think she’ll finish you off, to put it
very brutally, if Peter has taken up with her?”
“Go ahead,” (Peter “taken up” by that hardfaced, young woman. It was
just ridiculous. And yet I knew that I was being 1880 about her. She had
style, she was amusing.)
“Patricia, be a nice girl and take away this candy. I shall make myself
sick. And bring me my cigarette holder, the amber one.”
Then Lucia began: “I dislike Judith principally for a triviality, her
language, that is. Of course, the use of the vernacular, obscenity, in
common speech is just another one-time strictly masculine ceremonial
vice, like drinking and smoking, that has, recently, gone bi-sexual. I
think, though, there is a difference. Women, attractive women, in spite
of the opinion of the Bible belt, actually do not look a bit less
feminine, or desirable, with a cigarette in one hand and a cocktail
glass in the other, than their grandmothers did, with a fan, held right,
and a bouquet, left. The cocktail glass and cigarette are provocative,
gayer, that’s all. I’m not talking, naturally, about women one sees
draped, in alcoholic semi-stupor, about tables in cheap night-clubs. Men
of their type are as distressing.
“But about language. Perhaps the vernacular is picturesque, has a
flavour, in men’s clubs and bars, like the very physiological smutty
jokes they now begin to tell us. It remains, though, to me, incongruous
in the speech of a woman supposedly well bred. It affects me, when
Judith adorns her comments on bad weather, or something as casual, with
phrases one sees occasionally scrawled on walls of empty buildings, just
as if she appeared in her very good copies of French clothes chewing
tobacco and spitting at intervals.”
“I know, Lucia. That’s why I don’t think Peter _can_ take her
seriously.”
“That doesn’t follow, at all, Pat. You see, you gave that young man of
yours a horrible shock, if you’ll forgive me for mentioning it.” I
winced, she noticed it, but decided to go on.
“Oh, it was a very grand gesture, to tell him of your infidelity, and
you’ll never be so young, again, as to make another like it. . . . You
should have decided never to repeat the incident, and never to mention
it. Grand gestures are expensive. How expensive yours was, whether it’s
to cost you Peter for ever, you can’t tell yet. But it probably will.
You must have knocked all that half-baked young collegiate’s conceptions
about women, into a cocked hat.”
(Peter, a “half-baked young collegiate?” I’d never thought of that.
Perhaps he was.)
“Never mind, Pat. I did something as young as that once, with Arch. Tell
you sometime. To go on with Judith though. A woman of her sort, with the
just-one-of-the-boys attitude, may be precisely what Pete wants at the
moment, especially if something has gone wrong with the machinery in the
other pure love of his life. Judith has sex-appeal, a deliberate
sex-appeal. Of course, not like yours, Pat.”
“I haven’t any, couldn’t keep my own husband.”
“Don’t generalize from one example and an irrelevant one. You have a
practically universal sex-appeal. As soon as you begin to be even a
little interested in people, again, instead of just decorative but
altogether unresponsive, you’ll have dozens of men asking to ‘love’ (her
accent was derisive) you for a night or a month or two or even longer. I
worry about that.
“I have very little sex-appeal myself, Pat. Nothing passionate about me
except the colour of my hair. My spiritual expression puts men off me,
except as a daytime companion. I’m glad too. The other, the evading of
incessant pursuit, is so tiring. . . . That’ll do for another Sunday
sermon though.
“Judith, and women of her type, cultivate sex-appeal because they need
to. Women of her type—not really feminine, not pretty, even, actually,
succeed by being clever enough to accent what they have. Take her. She
has handsome auburn hair, not bad eyes (hazel aren’t they?) and a good
slim round figure. That’s all. Her features are just scattered about her
face. Can you remember her nose or hands or mouth or chin? Her knees are
much more vivid in my recollection. She always crosses them high. They
are quite nice, too. I remember them best, really, and her hair, for she
takes off her hat on every possible and impossible occasion, to let the
light shine on it. Why do I remember her eyes, I wonder? Oh yes, she
narrows them to look at people sleepily.”