Chapter 3

He came out of William’s room, sleek and fine. In William’s dinner coat
he looked much better than William ever did, because he had a more
attractive face and figure. His shoulders were straighter, his manner
more quietly assured. William was nervous; David wasn’t. These points do
make a difference in a man’s appearance.

Lucille, smiling at him over the flattering white fur collar of her
evening coat, patted William’s head.

“It’s a shame to leave you, Billy,” she said, “but you know—-“

“Oh, run along,” urged her husband, burrowing deeper yet into his
pillow, as into his only refuge. “I’ll be glad to be quiet.”

So they went. David hailed a taxi and put Lucille into it, wondering why
the sort of thing he was expecting should bore him so horribly in mere
anticipation when people like his cousin’s wife could be so thrilled at
doing what they had done hundreds of times before. There was nothing in
these efforts at a good time. Just a getting together of a dozen people,
none of whom were particularly remarkable or interesting to him–they
couldn’t be, or they wouldn’t have belonged in William’s and Lucille’s
set. He knew that set inside out and back again–he had met them all at
William’s apartment times enough to know what they were like. Good
enough fellows, sleekly dressed, making money and wanting to talk about
methods of making more. Their wives, young women who took excellent care
of their faces and hair and hands, dressed to surpass their husbands in
lateness of mode, and wore a constant air of eagerness to have the best
possible time that could be had by the means at their disposal. An
evening with these people meant cocktails, joking, laughter; more
cocktails, increasing laughter rapidly becoming boisterous, bridge with
higher and higher stakes, cooking something in a chafing dish sometime
after midnight; or, more likely, everybody having the same glorious
inspiration to go out somewhere and dance, and then to go somewhere else
and have scrambled eggs at three or four o’clock in the morning.

But to-night, he had to stick it pretty well through instead of getting
away when he wanted to, like a free bachelor; because he was taking
Lucille, and Lucille’s idea was not to be the first to go home from
anywhere if she could help it. David knew she thought she could help it
to-night, because she hadn’t William with her to say worriedly that he’d
got to be in the office at nine next morning. She understood well enough
that on these occasional visits of his, David hadn’t unavoidably to be
anywhere next morning. Just the same, he intended, along about two
o’clock at the latest, to lay a firm cousinly hand on her arm and say:
“Come along now, Lu. You know you’ve had enough. We’re going home.” And
because she liked him very, very much, she’d go–complaining bitterly,
but she’d go, because he was David and had a certain way of deciding
things which was difficult to resist.

So, practically led upon a leash, David went to this dinner, and there
he met Ross Collins.

II

ROSS, _with even greater reluctance than David, and with much
more rebellion, presents herself at a dinner that is just a
matter of duty to her–at first. She’s had a hard day at her
typewriter, and wanted to go to bed instead of making herself
agreeable. Life often presents that complication._

* * * * *

STRANGE HAPPENING AT GRANGE CORNERS

The roadster emerged with extreme caution from the side road
into the main highway. Therefore it did not smash into the great
touring car coming at a furious pace from the west, but missed
it by several feet. Therefore there was no accident, nobody was
rushed to the nearest hospital, and the headline above seems the
only one justified. It would be well if there could be more of
these mysterious failures to connect headlights at the bad
double crossing at Grange Corners.

Ross Collins pulled the sheet off her typewriter, glanced frowningly
over the item from Grange Corners, tore the sheet in two, and crumpling
it viciously dropped it into the immense wastebasket–nearly as large as
a clothes hamper–which stood at her elbow inviting contributions.

“Anything less amusing than that paragraph it’s not conceivable that one
could put forth,” she said to herself with uncompromising severity. She
glanced with some relief at the small clock on the corner of a crowded
table which was mutely announcing that it was now half after six, and
she might call it a day. What a day!

It was at this moment precisely, when she was sure to be lowest in her
spirits if her work had gone wrong, that her sister appeared to her in
the doorway. Such a sister!

Now Rosamond Collins herself–the Ross was her own contraction, for use
in the newspaper and other columns which she frequented when things had
gone better than they had to-day–was a slip of a thing in size. When
she hung upon a subway strap in the rush hours kindly disposed people
instinctively held themselves a little away, to give the child air.
Young men, not so kindly disposed, catching a glimpse of the face under
the close little black hat brim, were liable not to bother to give its
possessor air. Therefore Ross had developed a trick of keeping her head
down, and thus escaping notice by continuing to play the child rôle.

At her typewriter desk, however, as she looked up at her married elder
sister–Mrs. Kendall Cheney–Ross appeared to be no child. Her bright
red hair was the only bright thing about her just now. Her black-brown
eyes had dark shadows of fatigue beneath them, masses of wildly curling
locks drooped over them, her cheeks were pallid; she looked her age,
which was all of–never mind what, just now. Her black taffeta working
dress had its sleeves rolled up; the apartment furnaces were running
full blast in a cold December, and something had happened to the
radiator cut-off in Ross’s small room–she had to keep the window
halfway down to offset it, though snow-flakes now and then whirled
through and melted on her hair quite as though it set fire to them.

“My word, Ethel! You look like a French mannequin. How in the name of
time and money do you do it?”

“And you look like a little guttersnipe, my dear, with that hair of
yours in a tousle. Do you _write_ with your head, Ross, dear?”

“When it has any ideas in it. When it hasn’t I write with my spine and
all my nerves–and get nowhere, like to-day. Glory!–I’m glad I don’t
have to go to your party. I’m going to get me a snack somewhere, and so
to bed.”