Mr. Gilbert became, for the first and last time in
his life, a truly pathetic figure. That woman
he had broken to wait upon his body and play congregation
to his mind had ironically deserted him—just
when he could not much longer have supported her.
Never again would he be able so satisfactorily to
bore and bully a human soul.
SYMPOSIUM
Gloria had lulled Anthony’s mind to sleep.
She, who seemed of all women the wisest and the finest,
hung like a brilliant curtain across his doorways,
shutting out the light of the sun. In those first
years what he believed bore invariably the stamp of
Gloria; he saw the sun always through the pattern
of the curtain.
It was a sort of lassitude that brought them back
to Marietta for another summer. Through a golden
enervating spring they had loitered, restive and lazily
extravagant, along the California coast, joining other
parties intermittently and drifting from Pasadena to
Coronado, from Coronado to Santa Barbara, with no
purpose more apparent than Gloria’s desire to
dance by different music or catch some infinitesimal
variant among the changing colors of the sea.
Out of the Pacific there rose to greet them savage
rocklands and equally barbaric hostelries built that
at tea-time one might drowse into a languid wicker
bazaar glorified by the polo costumes of Southhampton
and Lake Forest and Newport and Palm Beach. And,
as the waves met and splashed and glittered in the
most placid of the bays, so they joined this group
and that, and with them shifted stations, murmuring
ever of those strange unsubstantial gaieties in wait
just over the next green and fruitful valley.
A simple healthy leisure class it was—the
best of the men not unpleasantly undergraduate—they
seemed to be on a perpetual candidates list for some
etherealized “Porcellian” or “Skull
and Bones” extended out indefinitely into the
world; the women, of more than average beauty, fragilely
athletic, somewhat idiotic as hostesses but charming
and infinitely decorative as guests. Sedately
and gracefully they danced the steps of their selection
in the balmy tea hours, accomplishing with a certain
dignity the movements so horribly burlesqued by clerk
and chorus girl the country over. It seemed ironic
that in this lone and discredited offspring of the
arts Americans should excel, unquestionably.
Having danced and splashed through a lavish spring,
Anthony and Gloria found that they had spent too much
money and for this must go into retirement for a certain
period. There was Anthony’s “work,”
they said. Almost before they knew it they were
back in the gray house, more aware now that other
lovers had slept there, other names had been called
over the banisters, other couples had sat upon the
porch steps watching the gray-green fields and the
black bulk of woods beyond.
