Conversation -- Fiction; Entertaining -- Fiction; Hospitality -- Fiction; New England -- Fiction
Equally unexplainably three totally non-concerned women turned also
to watch him.
"It's his shoulders," I ventured. "The amazing virility of his
shoulders contrasted with the stinginess of his smile."
"Stinginess nothing!" snapped my Husband. "Devil take him!"
"He may--yet," I mused as we swung into step again.
So now we had nothing to worry about--or rather no uncertainty to
worry about except the May Girl and the Singing Voice.
"The Singing Voice," my Husband argued, "might be picked up by good
fortune at most any cabaret show or choral practise. Not any
singing voice would do, of course. It must be distinctly poignant.
But even poignancy may be found sometimes where you least expect
it,--some reasonably mature, faintly disappointed sort of voice,
usually, lilting with unquestionable loveliness, just this side of
real professional success.
"But where in the world should we find a really ingenuous Ingénue?"
"They don't exist any more!" I asserted. "Gone out of style like
the Teddy Bear--! Old Ingénues you see, of course, sometimes, sweet
and precious and limp--as old Teddy Bears. But a brand new Ingénue--?
Don't you remember the awful search we had last year and even
then----?"
"Maybe you're right," worried my Husband.
And then the horrid attack of neuralgia descended on poor Mr.
Husband so suddenly, so acutely, that we didn't worry at all about
anything else for days! And even when that worry was over, instead
of starting off gaily together for the Carolinas as we had
intended, to search through steam-heated corridors, and green
velvet golfways, and jessamine scented lanes, for the May Girl, my
poor Husband had to dally at home instead, in a very cold, slushy
and disagreeable city, to be X-rayed, tooth-pulled, ear-stabbed,
and every thing but Bertilloned, while I, for certain business
reason, went on ahead to meet the Spring.
But even at parting it was the dramatic anxiety that worried my
Husband most.
"Now, don't you dare do a thing this time," he warned me, "until I
come! Look around all you want to! Get acquainted! Size things up!
But if ever two people needed to work together in a matter it's in
this question of choosing a May Girl!"
Whereupon in an impulse quite as amazing to himself as to me--he
went ahead and chose the May Girl all by himself!
Before I had been in the Carolinas three days the telegram came.
"Have found May Girl. Success beyond wildest dreams. Doubles with
Singing Voice. Absolute miracle. Explanations."
Himself and the explanations arrived a week later. Himself, poor
dear, was rather depleted. But the explanations were full enough to
have pleased anybody.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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