And so passed the tenth day of David’s illness,
with the smile on Elizabeth’s face growing a
trifle fixed as three days went by without the shabby
car rattling to the door; with “The Valley”
playing its second and final week before going into
New York; and with Leslie Ward unconsciously taking
up the shuttle Clare had dropped, and carrying the
pattern one degree further toward completion.
Just how Leslie Ward had drifted into his innocuous
affair with the star of “The Valley” he
was not certain himself. Innocuous it certainly
was. Afterwards, looking back, he was to wonder
sometimes if it had not been precisely for the purpose
it served. But that was long months after.
Not until the pattern was completed and he was able
to recognize his own work in it.
The truth was that he was not too happy at home.
Nina’s smart little house on the Ridgely Road
had at first kept her busy. She had spent unlimited
time with decorators, had studied and rejected innumerable
water-color sketches of interiors, had haunted auction
rooms and bid recklessly on things she felt at the
moment she could not do without, later on to have
to wheedle Leslie into straightening her bank balance.
Thought, too, and considerable energy had gone into
training and outfitting her servants, and still more
into inducing them to wear the expensive uniforms and
livery she provided.
But what she made, so successfully, was a house rather
than a home. There were times, indeed, when Leslie
began to feel that it was not even a house, but a
small hotel. They almost never dined alone,
and when they did Nina would explain that everybody
was tied up. Then, after dinner, restlessness
would seize her, and she would want to run in to the
theater, or to make a call. If he refused, she
nursed a grievance all evening.
And he did not like her friends. Things came
to a point where, when he knew one of the gay evenings
was on, he would stay in town, playing billiards at
his club, or occasionally wandering into a theater,
where he stood or sat at the back of the house and
watched the play with cynical, discontented eyes.
The casual meeting with Gregory and the introduction
to his sister brought a new interest. Perhaps
the very novelty was what first attracted him, the
oddity of feeling that he was on terms of friendship,
for it amounted to that with surprising quickness,
with a famous woman, whose face smiled out at him from
his morning paper or, huge and shockingly colored,
from the sheets on the bill boards.
He formed the habit of calling on her in the afternoons
at her hotel, and he saw that she liked it.
It was often lonely, she explained. He sent her
flowers and cigarettes, and he found her poised and
restful, and sometimes, when she was off guard, with
the lines of old suffering in her face.
