“Nothing of the sort,” I said coldly,
“and the fact that you didn’t marry me
does not give you the privilege of abusing my friends.
Anyhow, I don’t like you when you speak like
that.”
Jim took me to the door and stopped there to sigh.
“I haven’t been well,” he said heavily.
“Don’t eat, don’t sleep. Wouldn’t
you think I’d lose flesh? Kit”—he
lowered his voice solemnly—“I have
gained two pounds!”
I said he didn’t look it, which appeared to
comfort him somewhat, and, because we were old friends,
I asked him where Bella was. He said he thought
she was in Europe, and that he had heard she was going
to marry Reggie Wolfe. Then he signed again, muttered
something about ordering the funeral baked meats to
be prepared and left me.
That was my entire share in the affair. I was
the victim, both of circumstances and of their plot,
which was mad on the face of it.
During the entire time they never once let me forget
that I got up the dinner, that I telephoned around
for them. They asked me why I couldn’t
cook—when not one of them knew one side
of a range from the other. And for Anne Brown
to talk the way she did—saying I had always
been crazy about Jim, and that she believed I had
known all along that his aunt was coming—for
Anne to talk like that was sheer idiocy. Yes,
there was an aunt. The Japanese butler started
the trouble, and Aunt Selina carried it along.
It makes me angry every time I think how I tried to
make that dinner a success. I canceled a theater
engagement, and I took the Mercer girls in the electric
brougham father had given me for Christmas. Their
chauffeur had been gone for hours with their machine,
and they had telephoned all the police stations without
success. They were afraid that there had been
an awful smash; they could easily have replaced Bartlett,
as Lollie said, but it takes so long to get new parts
for those foreign cars.
Jim had a house well up-town, and it stood just enough
apart from the other houses to be entirely maddening
later. It was a three-story affair, with a basement
kitchen and servants’ dining room. Then,
of course, there were cellars, as we found out afterward.
On the first floor there was a large square hall, a
formal reception room, behind it a big living room
that was also a library, then a den, and back of all
a Georgian dining room, with windows high above the
ground. On the top floor Jim had a studio, like
every other one I ever saw—perhaps a little
mussier. Jim was really a grind at his painting,
and there were cigarette ashes and palette knives
and buffalo rugs and shields everywhere. It is
strange, but when I think of that terrible house,
I always see the halls, enormous, covered with heavy
rugs, and stairs that would have taken six housemaids
to keep in proper condition. I dream about those
stairs, stretching above me in a Jacob’s ladder
of shining wood and Persian carpets, going up, up,
clear to the roof.
