It was she who was mature and protective now.
“Why, of course! You shall run off by yourself!
Why don’t you get Paul to go along, and you boys
just fish and have a good time?” She patted his
shoulder—reaching up to it—while
he shook with palsied helplessness, and in that moment
was not merely by habit fond of her but clung to her
strength.
She cried cheerily, “Now up-stairs you go, and
pop into bed. We’ll fix it all up.
I’ll see to the doors. Now skip!”
For many minutes, for many hours, for a bleak eternity,
he lay awake, shivering, reduced to primitive terror,
comprehending that he had won freedom, and wondering
what he could do with anything so unknown and so embarrassing
as freedom.
No apartment-house in Zenith had more resolutely experimented
in condensation than the Revelstoke Arms, in which
Paul and Zilla Riesling had a flat. By sliding
the beds into low closets the bedrooms were converted
into living-rooms. The kitchens were cupboards
each containing an electric range, a copper sink,
a glass refrigerator, and, very intermittently, a
Balkan maid. Everything about the Arms was excessively
modern, and everything was compressed—except
the garages.
The Babbitts were calling on the Rieslings at the
Arms. It was a speculative venture to call on
the Rieslings; interesting and sometimes disconcerting.
Zilla was an active, strident, full-blown, high-bosomed
blonde. When she condescended to be good-humored
she was nervously amusing. Her comments on people
were saltily satiric and penetrative of accepted hypocrisies.
“That’s so!” you said, and looked
sheepish. She danced wildly, and called on the
world to be merry, but in the midst of it she would
turn indignant. She was always becoming indignant.
Life was a plot against her and she exposed it furiously.
She was affable to-night. She merely hinted that
Orville Jones wore a toupe, that Mrs. T. Cholmondeley
Frink’s singing resembled a Ford going into
high, and that the Hon. Otis Deeble, mayor of Zenith
and candidate for Congress, was a flatulent fool (which
was quite true). The Babbitts and Rieslings sat
doubtfully on stone-hard brocade chairs in the small
living-room of the flat, with its mantel unprovided
with a fireplace, and its strip of heavy gilt fabric
upon a glaring new player-piano, till Mrs. Riesling
shrieked, “Come on! Let’s put some
pep in it! Get out your fiddle, Paul, and I’ll
try to make Georgie dance decently.”
The Babbitts were in earnest. They were plotting
for the escape to Maine. But when Mrs. Babbitt
hinted with plump smilingness, “Does Paul get
as tired after the winter’s work as Georgie does?”
then Zilla remembered an injury; and when Zilla Riesling
remembered an injury the world stopped till something
had been done about it.
