Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Married people -- Fiction
The hotel was hot, too. Rose and Dolly, as soon as they had registered,
went up to their room and washed off the stains of travel, as well as
they could in translucent water that was the color of weak coffee. Then
Rose, in a kimono, stretched out on the bed to make up some of the rest
their early departure from Cedar Rapids had deprived her of. She did
this methodically whenever opportunity offered, but without any great
conviction.
Dolly, though she looked a bit hollow-eyed and much more in need of rest
than Rose (for she hadn't any stamina at all. She was an
under-nourished, and probably anemic little thing, and was always
train-sick when their jumps began too early in the morning), went
straight ahead with her toilet, tried to correct her pallor with a
little too much rouge, and with the glaring falsehood that it was
clearing up, put on the pathetic little fifteen-dollar suit that she
religiously guarded for occasions.
She was very fidgety, a little bit furtive, and elaborately over-casual
about all this; a fact to which Rose was, also a little artificially,
oblivious.
Their partnership had not proved, from Dolly's point of view, at any
rate, an unqualified success. They'd not been on the road three days
before she'd begun to wonder whether she hadn't been hasty in the
selection of her chum. Doris Dane was a very magnificent person, of
course. She made the rest of the company, including the principals, look
(this was a phrase Dolly had unguardedly used the day Rose first
appeared at rehearsal) like a bunch of rummies. And of course it was an
immense compliment to be singled out by an awe-inspiring person like
that, for her particular chum. Only, once the compliment had been paid,
its value as an abiding possession became a little doubtful. Awe is not
a very comfortable sort of emotion to eat breakfast with.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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