After that O-liver could give her nothing. He had an allowance from his
mother of three thousand a year. Fluffy Hair made as much as that in
three weeks. Where he had been king of his own domain he became a sort
of gentleman footman, carrying her sables and her satchels. But that was
not the worst of it. He found that they had not a taste in common. She
laughed at his books, at his love of sea and sky. She even laughed at
his Mary Pick, whose name suggested a hated rival.
And so he left her--laughing.
A certain sense of responsibility, however, took him to her once a
month, and a letter went to her every week. She was his wife. He
continued in a sense to watch over her. Yet she resented his watching.
From her stairway she had seen him, and when a rest was granted she came
down to him.
"I'll be through presently," she said. "We can go to my hotel."
Her rooms in the hotel overlooked the sea. There was a balcony, and they
sat on it in long lazy chairs and had iced things to drink.
O-liver drank lemonade. His wife had something stronger.
"I have not been well," she said; "it's a part of the doctor's
prescription."
She had removed the pink from her face, and he saw that she was pale.
"You are working too hard," he told her. "You'd better take a month in
the desert, out of doors."
She shivered. She hated the out-of-doors that he raved about. They had
spent their honeymoon in a tent. She had been wild to get back to
civilization. It had been their first moment of disillusion.
She showed him before he went some of the things she had acquired since
his last visit--an ermine coat, a string of pearls.
"I saw them in your last picture," he told her. "You really visit me by
proxy. I find your name on the boards, and walk in with a lot of other
men and look at you. And not one of them dreams that I've ever seen the
woman on the screen."
"Well, they wouldn't of course." She had never taken his name. Her own
was too valuable.
When he told her good-bye he asked a question: "Are you happy?"
For a moment her face clouded. "I'm not quite sure. Is anybody? But I
like the way I am living, Ollie."
He had a sense of relief. "So do I," he said. "I earn fifteen dollars a
week. The papers say that you earn fifteen hundred--and you're not quite
twenty."
"There isn't a man in this hotel that makes so much," she told him
complacently. "The women try to snub me, but they can't. Money talks."
It seemed to him that in her case it shouted. As he rode back on Mary
Pick he thought seriously of his fifteen dollars a week and her fifteen
hundred; and of how little either weighed in the balance of happiness.
IV
It was not until the following Saturday that he saw Jane. She had made
two hundred sandwiches. She had got Tommy's mother to help her. She had
invented new combinations, always holding to the idea of satisfying the
substantial appetites of men.
There would be no use, she argued, in offering five-o'clock-tea
combinations.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account