American fiction -- 20th century; Chicago (Ill.) -- Fiction; Journalists -- Fiction; Marriage -- Fiction
“A good line to end on,” she agreed, finishing the sentence and typing
his name underneath. “There are stamps in my pocketbook, Felix—and
here’s your envelope, all addressed. It will make the one o’clock
collection, and we can breakfast at leisure.”
“But,” he said, pausing at the door, “suppose it got lost in the mails
or something!”
“I made a carbon,” said Rose-Ann, “and you can take that with you when
you go to the office, in case of emergencies.”
“You _are_ an efficient little manageress!” he said.
5
Obediently the next day he went to a tailor—recommended by Clive, who
seemed heartily to approve of this particular surrender to
convention—and was measured for a dinner coat, and a new loose-fitting
suit of brown homespun selected by Rose-Ann.
He found he did not mind the idea of wearing evening clothes after all.
He only wished that—well, that he was going to pay for them himself!
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XXII. Mainly About Clothes
1
AND still they found no place to live, and their week at the St. Dunstan
became as second, and a third.
They went together to look at dozens of apartments. Rose-Ann was
observantly critical of their good and bad features, and yet extremely
complaisant; he felt that she would have agreed to anything he wanted.
But he had not forgotten her fierce discontent at “ordinary” apartments,
and he was looking for something that would really please her. He felt
that he had not found it yet....
And no one at the St. Dunstan had objected to the noise of their
typewriter on occasional evenings. They could have breakfast brought up
and set down on a tray at their bedside, a breakfast of cool grapefruit
and elaborately disguised eggs and coffee with cream, and linger over
their last sip of coffee and a final cigarette before dressing lazily;
and Felix could stroll into the office at ten o’clock, like Hawkins—a
free man and not a hurried, anxious slave.
Felix had at first felt a little guilty about these late appearances,
when everybody else had been at work for hours; but it was apparently
expected of him that he would take due advantage of the opportunities
for leisure that the position gave. So long as he did his work, it did
not matter when he came or went; Hawkins himself did not show up every
day—and there was that god-like being, the literary editor, McQuish, he
who had taught the Chicago intelligentsia to speak of their “reactions”
and of being “intrigued”: he fulminated his Wednesday critiques locked
in his office on Tuesday afternoon and except for his Tuesday arrival
and departure was never seen around the place at all!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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