... They did so. Yes, it was Mrs. Anthony
Patch speaking—but how did she know that
this man was her husband? How could she know?
Let the police sergeant ask her if she remembered
the milk bottles ...
He leaned forward hurriedly and tapped at the glass.
The taxi was only at Brooklyn Bridge, but the metre
showed a dollar and eighty cents, and Anthony would
never have omitted the ten per cent tip.
Later in the afternoon he returned to the apartment.
Gloria had also been out—shopping—and
was asleep, curled in a corner of the sofa with her
purchase locked securely in her arms. Her face
was as untroubled as a little girl’s, and the
bundle that she pressed tightly to her bosom was a
child’s doll, a profound and infinitely healing
balm to her disturbed and childish heart.
It was with this party, more especially with Gloria’s
part in it, that a decided change began to come over
their way of living. The magnificent attitude
of not giving a damn altered overnight; from being
a mere tenet of Gloria’s it became the entire
solace and justification for what they chose to do
and what consequence it brought. Not to be sorry,
not to loose one cry of regret, to live according
to a clear code of honor toward each other, and to
seek the moment’s happiness as fervently and
persistently as possible.
“No one cares about us but ourselves, Anthony,”
she said one day. “It’d be ridiculous
for me to go about pretending I felt any obligations
toward the world, and as for worrying what people think
about me, I simply don’t, that’s
all. Since I was a little girl in dancing-school
I’ve been criticised by the mothers of all the
little girls who weren’t as popular as I was,
and I’ve always looked on criticism as a sort
of envious tribute.”
This was because of a party in the “Boul’
Mich’” one night, where Constance Merriam
had seen her as one of a highly stimulated party of
four. Constance Merriam, “as an old school
friend,” had gone to the trouble of inviting
her to lunch next day in order to inform her how terrible
it was.
“I told her I couldn’t see it,”
Gloria told Anthony. “Eric Merriam is a
sort of sublimated Percy Wolcott—you remember
that man in Hot Springs I told you about—his
idea of respecting Constance is to leave her at home
with her sewing and her baby and her book, and such
innocuous amusements, whenever he’s going on
a party that promises to be anything but deathly dull.”
“Did you tell her that?”
“I certainly did. And I told her that what
she really objected to was that I was having a better
time than she was.”
Anthony applauded her. He was tremendously proud
of Gloria, proud that she never failed to eclipse
whatever other women might be in the party, proud
that men were always glad to revel with her in great
rowdy groups, without any attempt to do more than
enjoy her beauty and the warmth of her vitality.
