She frowned. "I don't know much about your friends in town, since so
many of them are in the war," she admitted. "There's Merry Vail, of
course, who roomed with you at Harvard, but he hasn't come out here
much since Adela divorced him after that business in Bermuda. Sometimes
you talk about the men you see at the Club but I've never been able
to keep track of the Phils and Bills and Neds and Joes and Dicks and
Harrys. You'll have to find your own way there. At the office, of
course, there's Graham Wasson and Phil Cone, your partners, but you
won't have much trouble once you're at your desk. Wasson is dark and
plump and Cone is fair and plump and they're both about five years
younger than you are."
"The office doesn't worry me," I agreed. "I can handle anything that
develops there."
"You know, Winnie," Jimmie remarked, "if I were you I wouldn't try to
go to town for a few days. The office will run itself and you need a
rest. I don't know much about amnesia but I've always heard that rest
and kind treatment--"
"Uh-uh!" I dissented emphatically. "Worst thing in the world for it.
I've always heard that the thing to do is to go back over the ground
until you come to the thing that gave you the original shock and then
it all comes back to you. If I stick around Bedford Hills I'll just get
panicky over not being sure whether I remember things or not. I'll go
to town in the morning and see if I can't find myself."
She laughed, as wives laugh. "You may be a changed man," she announced,
"but you're still stubborn as a mule. Tell me, to change the subject,
you say that you remember me. Tell me what I seem like to you, now
that you've changed, as you say, aside from age, sex, scars and
distinguishing marks, if any, and marital status."
I closed my eyes and thought of Dorothy as she had been that last night
in Hartford before she walked out and I decided to join the Navy as a
Reserve Officer.
"You are piano music on a summer night--something Scarlatti or
Mozart--thin, cool, precise, gay. You are apple blossoms against a
Berkshire hillside. You are the smoke of fallen leaves climbing into
the cool October sky. You are surf on a sandy beach, with the gulls
wheeling and the white-caps racing past the lighthouse on the point.
You are bobsleds and hot coffee and dough-nuts by a roaring wood fire.
And you're a lost child, with two pennies in your fist, looking in the
window of a five-cent candy-shop."
Germaine relaxed. "Except for that last bit, Winnie, you made me sound
like a year-round vacation resort or an ad for a new automobile. You've
mentioned almost everything about me except the one thing I obviously
am."
"Which is?"
"A simple, rather stupid woman, I guess," Germaine sighed, "who's had
everything in life except what she wants."
"All women are simple," I pontificated, "since what they want is
simple."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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