“I like that second baby,” she said.
“What I’d really like,” continued
Anthony, “would be to have two sets of triplets
one year apart and then experiment with the six boys—”
“Poor me,” she interjected.
“—I’d educate them each in
a different country and by a different system and
when they were twenty-three I’d call them together
and see what they were like.”
“Let’s have ’em all with my neck,”
suggested Gloria.
The car was at length repaired and with a deliberate
vengeance took up where it left off the business of
causing infinite dissension. Who should drive?
How fast should Gloria go? These two questions
and the eternal recriminations involved ran through
the days. They motored to the Post-Road towns,
Rye, Portchester, and Greenwich, and called on a dozen
friends, mostly Gloria’s, who all seemed to be
in different stages of having babies and in this respect
as well as in others bored her to a point of nervous
distraction. For an hour after each visit she
would bite her fingers furiously and be inclined to
take out her rancor on Anthony.
“I loathe women,” she cried in a mild
temper. “What on earth can you say to them—except
talk ‘lady-lady’? I’ve enthused
over a dozen babies that I’ve wanted only to
choke. And every one of those girls is either
incipiently jealous and suspicious of her husband if
he’s charming or beginning to be bored with
him if he isn’t.”
“Don’t you ever intend to see any women?”
“I don’t know. They never seem clean
to me—never—never. Except
just a few. Constance Shaw—you know,
the Mrs. Merriam who came over to see us last Tuesday—is
almost the only one. She’s so tall and fresh-looking
and stately.”
“I don’t like them so tall.”
Though they went to several dinner dances at various
country clubs, they decided that the autumn was too
nearly over for them to “go out” on any
scale, even had they been so inclined. He hated
golf; Gloria liked it only mildly, and though she
enjoyed a violent rush that some undergraduates gave
her one night and was glad that Anthony should be
proud of her beauty, she also perceived that their
hostess for the evening, a Mrs. Granby, was somewhat
disquieted by the fact that Anthony’s classmate,
Alec Granby, joined with enthusiasm in the rush.
The Granbys never phoned again, and though Gloria laughed,
it piqued her not a little.
“You see,” she explained to Anthony, “if
I wasn’t married it wouldn’t worry her—but
she’s been to the movies in her day and she thinks
I may be a vampire. But the point is that placating
such people requires an effort that I’m simply
unwilling to make.... And those cute little freshmen
making eyes at me and paying me idiotic compliments!
I’ve grown up, Anthony.”
