The Sunday after Gloria's return to her father's house, Aunt Dorcas
came to dinner. She brought Uncle Henry along with her ... a small,
silent man. He had been married to Aunt Dorcas for twenty-four
years. And he showed it.
"I told you that Gloria had left her husband, didn't I, Henry?" Aunt
Dorcas asked between bites of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.
Uncle Henry made a tired sound in his throat.
"And a very good thing it was, too," Aunt Dorcas went on. "A very
good thing!"
Gloria raised her eyes to her aunt's large, florid face. "Why is it
a good thing for a woman to leave her husband?" she asked.
"That's not what I said," Aunt Dorcas answered, sharply. "But in
your case it was. When a girl ... a poor girl ... marries the son of
rich parents, and they treat her as the Gregorys treated you, the
best thing she can do is to clear out!"
Gloria looked down at her plate.
"They've been very nice to me ... both Father and Mother Gregory,"
she said. "They gave us the money for our honeymoon, you know. And
Mother Gregory gave us the family silver for a wedding present."
Aunt Dorcas raised one hand like a traffic policeman. "A-aah!" she
cried, "but that was for their son! ... What did they ever do for
you? ... Did old Mrs. Gregory ever give a party to introduce you to
all their high-and-mighty friends? Not she! She left you right out
in the cold, as far as I can see!"
Aunt Dorcas folded her hands on her magnificent chest, and looked
around, daring any one to deny what she had said.
No one did. The meal came to an end at last.
Gloria followed her father and Uncle Henry out on to the front porch,
leaving her mother and aunt to clear away the dishes.
There were times when she couldn't stand Aunt Dorcas in large
doses.... To-day was one of them.
She sat down on the front steps, and looked through the Sunday paper.
Suddenly the photograph of a house in the advertising section caught
her eye. It looked like their house ... Dick's and hers. It was
their house!
"Owner must sell," read the cutline beneath the picture. "Six-room
house, with finished attic. Everything in good condition. Good
terms if buyer takes furniture. Call Mr. Gregory, Stentorian
Building."
So Dick was going to sell the furniture, too! Everything that had
been theirs ... the friendly yellow lamp in the living-room, the
cunning white kitchen table, the gold-colored Chinese rug that had
lain like sunlight on the floor of the dining-room.
"I suppose he'll sell even the little red smoking-stand I gave him
for Christmas," Gloria thought miserably, "and my little tea-wagon!"
The little tea-wagon had been the pride of Gloria's heart. It had
looked so homey with its blue tea cups, and the little silver teapot
that had been Dick's grandmother's.
"I think I'll telephone Dick and ask him for the little tea-wagon,"
she made up her mind that night, as she lay in bed.
But when the morning came she did not telephone. She decided to go
to Dick's office to ask him for the tea-wagon. She didn't know why
... but she wanted to see him! She wanted terribly to see him
again....
She spent two hours bathing herself, brushing her hair, making
herself lovely for Dick's eyes. Her beauty was her only weapon
against Miss Briggs. She must keep it bright and shining!
"Thank goodness, I'm still young!" she thought. "Years younger than
Miss Briggs, who must be at least thirty.
"After a while I shall be thirty, and call myself twenty-nine,"
Gloria said to herself. "But I'll bet I won't look like Sue Briggs!
So long as there's a grain of powder or an inch of lipstick left in
the world, I'll have it, by jinks!"
Her heart was light as she hurried down the street to the street car
line. She hummed happily, as women do when they are going to meet
the man they love ... But did she love Dick? She didn't know. She
knew only that in a few minutes she would be seeing him again. That
was enough.
... She had hardly stepped from the street car when she did see him.
He was not ten feet away from her, walking along the pavement. And
beside him, looking up into his eyes, was Susan Briggs!
Gloria's one fear was that the two might see her.
Quickly, as if she were fleeing, she ran across the sidewalk, and
into a drugstore. She sat down at the soda fountain and ordered a
chocolate sundae.
When it came, the sight of it made her ill. She paid her check and
hurried out into the fresh air and the sunshine.
... Thank goodness, Dick and Miss Briggs were nowhere in sight!
"I suppose they're having lunch somewhere, together," Gloria thought,
with a pang of self-pity. She walked along, not knowing or caring
where she was going ...
Then a poster outside a moving picture theater caught her eye.
"Jealous Wives"--the words flamed out of it.
Gloria smiled grimly to herself. "I'm one of them," she thought. "I
think I'll go in, and see what it's all about."
She went into the dark, cool cavern of the theater. She sank
gratefully into a chair.... Ah, it was good to be here, alone! Away
from her mother's disappointed eyes, her father's kindliness, from
Aunt Dorcas' sharp tongue ... away from everybody.
There was no sound in the theater except the whirring of a huge
electric fan in the center of the ceiling. Down in the orchestra
pit, the organist was turning the leaves of his music.
The picture flashed on the screen. Against it Gloria could see the
silhouette of a man who sat directly in front of her ... Dick!
She leaned over to touch him upon the shoulder. Then caught
herself.... No, he would have to come to her! She was through
begging him to take her back....
But there was a certain cold comfort in the thought that he was not
with Miss Briggs, at any rate. She must have merely walked out of
the building with him on her way to lunch.
Gloria was glad of that. The thought that Dick could give her up for
a plain woman like Susan Briggs had added to her cup of bitterness.
Perhaps, after all, he didn't care so very much for her.
Suddenly Dick shifted a little in his seat. Gloria held her breath.
Suppose he should turn around and see her there! ... He would think
that she had followed him into the theater.
No, he mustn't think that. She would never give him another chance
to think she wanted him to take her back.... She was through!
Softly she slipped from her chair, and walked out of the twilight of
the theater.
But a great loneliness dropped down on her like a cloud, as she went
out into the thronged street. How lonely a crowd could make you
feel....
Gloria turned away from the center of the town. She walked along
familiar streets. She knew where she was going.... Home!
Not to her mother's house, but to the little place that had been
Dick's and hers! She was going to that forbidden place ... the one
spot on the whole wide earth where she felt at home.
How cozy and happy the little green and white house looked as Gloria
came down the street toward it! It seemed to twinkle a welcome to
her with all of its shining windows.
... But in the center of the green lawn was a real estate agent's
"For Sale" sign. Gloria had a sudden impulse to pull up the sign, as
she might have torn a weed out of the lawn....
"Hello, there, lady!" a voice hailed her.
Her neighbor, Mrs. Donberg, was leaning out of one of the
second-floor windows of the house next door.
"I was thinking of calling up the real estate people to ask them to
show me through your house," she said in her shrill voice. "But now
that you're here you can let me in. I'll be right over!"
Gloria eyed her coldly. "I'm sorry, Mrs. Donberg," she said, "but I
haven't any key with me. I--I just came to pick some of the roses in
the back yard.... Were you thinking of buying the house?"
"Well, we'd love to have it. It's a little bigger than ours," Mrs.
Donberg answered.
Gloria knew perfectly well that she had no thought of buying the
house. "She just wants to look through it, to see all my things! ...
The big busy-body!" she told herself angrily, as she walked around to
the back yard.
She didn't want Mrs. Donberg poking around her house! She didn't
want any one to look through her house! ... And the thought that some
one would presently buy it and live in it was unbearable to Gloria.
Why, it belonged to her ... that house! She had picked out every
scrap of wall paper in it ... every stick of furniture! What right
had Dick to sell her house...?
"I'm going in," Gloria made up her mind, suddenly.
On the grass lay a clothes pole. Gloria put the sharp iron end of it
under one of the sunroom windows. Using it as a lever she finally
managed to get the window open.
She laughed aloud when she stood in the sunroom. "No wonder there
are so many burglars, if housebreaking is as easy as this!" she
thought.
She sat down at the piano and ran her hands lightly along the keys in
the opening bars of Offenbach's "Barcarolle."
"No," she thought, springing up, "I'd better not play that thing....
It always makes me want to cry...."
She knew that she was on the very edge of tears.
Who would have thought, a year ago, that she could ever have felt
this way about a silly old house?
Gloria looked around her. There was Dick's chair ... and the reading
lamp swung above it. There was the little red smoking-stand she had
given him. The tray on it was filled with fine gray ash.
... She closed her eyes. She could see him sitting there, with a
book in his hands, smoking his old pipe! ...
Ah, it wasn't the house that Gloria was homesick for, she knew, at
last. It was Dick she wanted! Dick!
She dropped into his chair, and laid her head back against the
brocade where his head had rested. Tears filled her throat, burned
behind her closed eyelids.
"I mustn't cry!" she told herself. "I mustn't let myself feel this
way about him! It's going to break my heart, if I do..."
But the house was alive with Dick.
The table where he had made little marks by knocking out his pipe,
the writing desk, the magazines piled on one broad arm of his chair
spoke of him.
Gloria shook herself, and went upstairs. Her feet made no sound upon
the steps. She felt dreadfully alone.
On the threshold of Dick's room she paused. His bed was still just
as she had left it ... made up with clean linen and the best
embroidered pillow-cases. He had not slept at home then, at all! He
must be living again with Mother and Father Gregory.
Gloria looked into the clothes closet. Yes, his clothes were all
gone.
The top of his dresser was bare. The drawers were empty. The books
had been taken from the little bookcase that stood beside Dick's bed..
But on it stood a large framed photograph of Gloria herself in her
wedding dress. So Dick had not cared to take that along with him to
his father's house!
"Well, who could blame him?" thought Gloria. "I don't suppose he has
many happy memories of me, after all...."
Now that she stopped to think of it, there had been more storm than
sunshine in their life together.
"And the whole thing has been my fault," Gloria told herself sternly.
It was the truth ... and it hurt.
She turned to look at herself in the glass, as a judge might have
looked at a prisoner.
She put herself on trial.... She knew she had done none of the
things a good wife ought to do for her husband.
She had never taken care of his house ... never looked after his
comfort. She had told him bluntly that she would never give him a
family. Children were too great a bother....
She had not even been utterly faithful to him; hadn't she let Stanley
Wayburn make love to her? ...
As Gloria stood there before the glass, the telephone rang.
It startled her. She had supposed Dick would have had the phone
taken out of the house.... He must have forgotten it.
"Hello," she said,
"Hello, Gloria," May Seymour answered her. "So you didn't leave home
after all?"
"I did," Gloria said. "I just came back here this afternoon for a
few minutes ... to get some things I had forgotten. I'm staying at
my mother's house, you know."
"Wait there for me a few minutes, will you?" May asked. "I'll be
right over. I want to talk to you."
"All right," Gloria replied listlessly. "Only hurry. I want to get
out of this place. It's spooky."
The truth was that she didn't want to see May. She didn't want her
in the house. She wanted to be alone there, for a while ... to think
things out.
She heard May laugh mirthlessly. "Spooky?" she repeated. "If you
think your house is spooky, you ought to spend a night here in mine.
It's fairly haunted.... Good-by."
Gloria shuddered as she hung the receiver on its hook. She wondered
how May stayed there in the house where Dr. John had killed
himself....
She ran downstairs to see if there were any cigarettes in the silver
box on Dick's smoking-stand. May loved a smoke, occasionally ...
There were a half dozen cigarettes in the box. Gloria stood looking
at them, for a minute. Then she picked them up and threw them into
the empty grate.
No, she made up her mind, she would never smoke again! She was
through doing the things that Dick said no nice woman would do!
Even though he should never know it, she would become the kind of
wife he had always wanted her to be!
Gloria stood at the window watching for May to drive up in her little
crimson car.
But she came in a taxicab. And the driver followed her up the front
walk, carrying two large traveling bags.
The instant she set foot in the house, Gloria saw that there was some
subtle change in her. She was not the crushed and tearful May of a
week ago.
The air of dash and impudence that had been her chief charm had
returned to her. She had reddened her lips, and around the collar of
her soft black dress was a row of little pearls.
"Don't look so surprised," she said to Gloria as she sank into Dick's
chair. "I told you 'way last week that I was going to shake the dust
of this town from my shoes, didn't I?"
"Yes," Gloria nodded, "but I had no idea that you were going so
soon..."
"Why should I stay here?" May asked. "There's nothing for me in this
burg that I can see! Nothing but a lot of friends who've stopped
speaking to me and a story that I'll never be able to live down..."
"Where are you going?" Gloria asked.
May threw out her hands with a vague gesture. "New York, London ...
Paris ... Bombay. Who knows?" she asked. "Thank heaven, I have
enough money to keep me going! Going, going ... that's the only way
for me to keep from losing my mind, I guess."
She stopped speaking, and stared out of the window, as if her eyes
were filled with long distances already...
"Why don't you go with me, Gloria?" she asked suddenly, "That's what
I came here to ask you.... You know, you'll never go back to Dick
now that you've actually left him, don't you?"
Gloria nodded, without a word.
"Well, then," May went on, "tell him you want some money and come
along with me. I'm going to stay at a hotel to-night, and take an
early train in the morning. You could get ready to go by then,
couldn't you?"
Gloria looked at her thoughtfully. The idea tempted her. What was
this dull town to her, now that she had lost Dick? ...
"For two pins ... for two little rusty, bent pins... I'd go with
you, May," she said slowly. "But, somehow or other, I just can't do
it. As long as Dick's here ... I've got to stay I guess...."
"What I can't understand," May answered, with a little frown on her
face, "is how Dick ever happened to let you pick up and leave him."
Her eyes questioned Gloria.
"Oh, I guess he just got tired of me," Gloria said with a break in
her voice. "He wanted a home-keeping wife. And I wasn't one. I
bored him."
"Bored him? Never! ... Not with that face of yours!" May exclaimed.
"Oh, blah! Men get tired of nothing but a woman's looks," Gloria
told her. "You can get them with your beauty. But you've got to
hold them with something else.... Brains, for one thing. And love
and care."
"Love and care! You talk about them as if they were babies!" May
laughed.
"Well, and so they are! They're only grown-up children," Gloria went
on, with that new wisdom of hers. "When life bangs them on the head,
they want some one to rub the bump, and tell them not to mind ... And
they want their food right on the dot, poor things, just as a baby
does!"
She stopped and shook a solemn forefinger at May.
"And you flip it from the Flapper, that the wife who wins is the one
who mothers her man," she said. "I used to think that what Dick
wanted was a playmate. And all of the time he wanted some one to
take his troubles to ... some one to mother him!"
May's red lips curled. "Don't kid yourself that you were ever Dick's
playmate, dearie," she said sarcastically. "All the playing around
you did was with Stan Wayburn, it seemed to me...."
Gloria flushed. "I know it," she admitted. "I know I wasn't ...
anything to Dick. I just fell down on my job. No wonder he doesn't
want me any more..." She burst into tears.
May looked at her thoughtfully.
"Well, if you're sure Dick's through with you, what are you sticking
around here for?" she asked. "Believe me, I'd go to see a lawyer so
fast it would make your head swim!"
"Go to see a lawyer?" Gloria echoed faintly. "What do you mean?"
"I mean ... get a divorce," May answered. "What's the use of being
tied to a man who doesn't care a snap of his fingers about you? You
say Dick doesn't."
Gloria put her head on one side like a wise robin.
"We-ell, I don't know, May," she mused. "Divorce has always seemed a
terrible thing to me..."
"No more terrible than the way you're living now!" May answered
briskly. "You're neither married nor single!"
Gloria sighed. "I'm awfully lonely," she said sadly.
May got up to go. "Oh, you make me sick!" she exclaimed. "If I
cared about a man I'll bet I'd make him care about me ... or know the
reason why! Why don't you go to Dick and tell him you're going to
divorce him? That'll bring him 'round, fast enough!"
"Nothing will do that," Gloria answered. "I tell you he's through
with me! I know Dick ... when he says he's through he means it!"
She sat staring into space while May telephoned for a taxi-cab to
take herself and her bags down to the hotel.
She drew a long breath of pure relief when May had gone, and she
stood alone in the house once more ... the dear, familiar house.
Gloria hated to leave it. She had told May it was "spooky." It was
not "spooky" ... except that it was haunted with memory. Gloria
could almost feel Dick with her in the empty room.
She ran out into the back yard and picked a bouquet of roses. She
put them in a vase on the table beside Dick's chair. She drew his
little smoking-stand up beside it. There was dust on it....
Gloria wiped it off with her clean handkerchief.