New York (State) -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
The sculptress's first name was Marguerite and Gilfoyle longed to call
her by it, after his second goblet of claret-and-water. He had a
passion for first names. He had the quick enthusiasm of a lawyer or an
advertising-man for a new client. Before he quite realized the enormity
of his perfidy he was pretending to compose a poem to Marguerite. He
wrote busily on an old bill of fare which had already been persecuted by
an artist or two. And he wrote his Anita poem over again in Marguerite's
honor, _mutatis mutandis_.
Pretty maid, pretty maid, may I say Marguerita?
Your last name is sweet, but your first name is sweeter.
And so on to the bitter end.
He slipped the lyric to Marguerite and she read it with squeals of
delight, while Gilfoyle looked as modest as such a genius could. The
other girl had to read it, of course, while Gilfoyle tried to look
unconscious. He was as successful as one is who tries to hold a casual
expression for a photograph.
The other girl's reward was a shrug and the diluted claret of a “Very
nice!” Gilfoyle said, “You're no judge or else you're jealous.” The two
men read it, and said, “Mush!” and “Slushgusher!” but Marguerite's eyes
belonged to Gilfoyle the rest of the evening, also her hands now and
then.
Remembering this, Gilfoyle was uneasy. One ought to be careful to keep
an aseptic memory at home. Yet if this was not infidelity, what would
be? In a rich man Gilfoyle would have called it a typical result of the
evil influence of wealth. In the absence of wealth it was a gay little
Pierrot-perfidy of the _vie de Boheme_. Still, poets have to be like
that. An actor must make love to whatever leading lady confronts him,
and so must poets, the lawyers and press agents of love.
But when he got home Gilfoyle repented as he remembered. He suffered on
a rack of guilty bliss, but he managed to hold back the secret which was
bubbling up in him with a bromo-seltzer effervescence. Incidentally his
“pretty maid, pretty maid, Marguerite” had kept back the fact that she
had a husband in the hardware business in Terre Haute. What the husband
was keeping back is none of this history's business.
It was all as old and unoriginal as original sin. The important thing
to Kedzie was the fact that shortly after the poem had been revamped a
stranger had joined, first in song with Gilfoyle's table-load and then
in conversation. He had ended by introducing his companion and bringing
her over. Had it not been for the fine democracy of Bohemia they would
have cut the creature dead. She was a buyer, one of Miss Ferber's Emma
McChesneys on a lark.
Gilfoyle did not tell Kedzie any of this. He told what followed as he
toiled at the fearfully complicated problem of his shoe-laces, a problem
rendered almost insuperable by the fact that he could not hold his foot
high very long and dared not hold his head low at all.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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