There’s a regiment a-coming down the
grand Trunk road.
He tapped his foot to the rhythm; he looked normal
and reassured. But when he complimented her,
“That was fine. I don’t know but what
you can elocute just as good as Ella Stowbody,”
she banged the book and suggested that they were not
too late for the nine o’clock show at the movies.
That was her last effort to harvest the April wind,
to teach divine unhappiness by a correspondence course,
to buy the lilies of Avalon and the sunsets of Cockaigne
in tin cans at Ole Jenson’s Grocery.
But the fact is that at the motion-pictures she discovered
herself laughing as heartily as Kennicott at the humor
of an actor who stuffed spaghetti down a woman’s
evening frock. For a second she loathed her laughter;
mourned for the day when on her hill by the Mississippi
she had walked the battlements with queens. But
the celebrated cinema jester’s conceit of dropping
toads into a soup-plate flung her into unwilling tittering,
and the afterglow faded, the dead queens fled through
darkness.
She went to the Jolly Seventeen’s afternoon
bridge. She had learned the elements of the game
from the Sam Clarks. She played quietly and reasonably
badly. She had no opinions on anything more polemic
than woolen union-suits, a topic on which Mrs. Howland
discoursed for five minutes. She smiled frequently,
and was the complete canary-bird in her manner of
thanking the hostess, Mrs. Dave Dyer.
Her only anxious period was during the conference
on husbands.
The young matrons discussed the intimacies of domesticity
with a frankness and a minuteness which dismayed Carol.
Juanita Haydock communicated Harry’s method
of shaving, and his interest in deer-shooting.
Mrs. Gougerling reported fully, and with some irritation,
her husband’s inappreciation of liver and bacon.
Maud Dyer chronicled Dave’s digestive disorders;
quoted a recent bedtime controversy with him in regard
to Christian Science, socks and the sewing of buttons
upon vests; announced that she “simply wasn’t
going to stand his always pawing girls when he went
and got crazy-jealous if a man just danced with her”;
and rather more than sketched Dave’s varieties
of kisses.
So meekly did Carol give attention, so obviously was
she at last desirous of being one of them, that they
looked on her fondly, and encouraged her to give such
details of her honeymoon as might be of interest.
She was embarrassed rather than resentful. She
deliberately misunderstood. She talked of Kennicott’s
overshoes and medical ideals till they were thoroughly
bored. They regarded her as agreeable but green.
Till the end she labored to satisfy the inquisition.
She bubbled at Juanita, the president of the club,
that she wanted to entertain them. “Only,”
she said, “I don’t know that I can give
you any refreshments as nice as Mrs. Dyer’s
salad, or that simply delicious angel’s-food
we had at your house, dear.”
