Later they slept, to wake an hour before dawn with
the gray house dancing in phantom glory before their
dazzled eyes.
For that autumn the gray house welcomed them with
a rush of sentiment that falsified its cynical old
age. True, there were the laundry-bags, there
was Gloria’s appetite, there was Anthony’s
tendency to brood and his imaginative “nervousness,”
but there were intervals also of an unhoped-for serenity.
Close together on the porch they would wait for the
moon to stream across the silver acres of farmland,
jump a thick wood and tumble waves of radiance at
their feet. In such a moonlight Gloria’s
face was of a pervading, reminiscent white, and with
a modicum of effort they would slip off the blinders
of custom and each would find in the other almost
the quintessential romance of the vanished June.
One night while her head lay upon his heart and their
cigarettes glowed in swerving buttons of light through
the dome of darkness over the bed, she spoke for the
first time and fragmentarily of the men who had hung
for brief moments on her beauty.
“Do you ever think of them?” he asked
her.
“Only occasionally—when something
happens that recalls a particular man.”
“What do you remember—their kisses?”
“All sorts of things.... Men are different
with women.”
“Different in what way?”
“Oh, entirely—and quite inexpressibly.
Men who had the most firmly rooted reputation for
being this way or that would sometimes be surprisingly
inconsistent with me. Brutal men were tender,
negligible men were astonishingly loyal and lovable,
and, often, honorable men took attitudes that were
anything but honorable.”
“For instance?”
“Well, there was a boy named Percy Wolcott from
Cornell who was quite a hero in college, a great athlete,
and saved a lot of people from a fire or something
like that. But I soon found he was stupid in a
rather dangerous way.”
“What way?”
“It seems he had some naive conception of a
woman ‘fit to be his wife,’ a particular
conception that I used to run into a lot and that always
drove me wild. He demanded a girl who’d
never been kissed and who liked to sew and sit home
and pay tribute to his self-esteem. And I’ll
bet a hat if he’s gotten an idiot to sit and
be stupid with him he’s tearing out on the side
with some much speedier lady.”
“I’d be sorry for his wife.”
“I wouldn’t. Think what an ass she’d
be not to realize it before she married him.
He’s the sort whose idea of honoring and respecting
a woman would be never to give her any excitement.
With the best intentions, he was deep in the dark
ages.”
“What was his attitude toward you?”
