The Beautiful and Damned
kitchen with red tin, Colonial it defiantly remained.
"How did you happen to come to Marietta?" demanded the real-estate agent
in a tone that was first cousin to suspicion. He was showing them
through four spacious and airy bedrooms.
"We broke down," explained Gloria. "I drove over a fire-hydrant and we
had ourselves towed to the garage and then we saw your sign."
The man nodded, unable to follow such a sally of spontaneity. There was
something subtly immoral in doing anything without several months'
consideration.
They signed a lease that night and, in the agent's car, returned
jubilantly to the somnolent and dilapidated Marietta Inn, which was too
broken for even the chance immoralities and consequent gaieties of a
country road-house. Half the night they lay awake planning the things
they were to do there. Anthony was going to work at an astounding pace
on his history and thus ingratiate himself with his cynical
grandfather.... When the car was repaired they would explore the country
and join the nearest "really nice" club, where Gloria would play golf
"or something" while Anthony wrote. This, of course, was Anthony's
idea--Gloria was sure she wanted but to read and dream and be fed tomato
sandwiches and lemonades by some angelic servant still in a shadowy
hinterland. Between paragraphs Anthony would come and kiss her as she
lay indolently in the hammock.... The hammock! a host of new dreams in
tune to its imagined rhythm, while the wind stirred it and waves of sun
undulated over the shadows of blown wheat, or the dusty road freckled
and darkened with quiet summer rain....
And guests--here they had a long argument, both of them trying to be
extraordinarily mature and far-sighted. Anthony claimed that they would
need people at least every other week-end "as a sort of change." This
provoked an involved and extremely sentimental conversation as to
whether Anthony did not consider Gloria change enough. Though he assured
her that he did, she insisted upon doubting him.... Eventually the
conversation assumed its eternal monotone: "What then? Oh, what'll we
do then?"
"Well, we'll have a dog," suggested Anthony.
"I don't want one. I want a kitty." She went thoroughly and with great
enthusiasm into the history, habits, and tastes of a cat she had once
possessed. Anthony considered that it must have been a horrible
character with neither personal magnetism nor a loyal heart.
Later they slept, to wake an hour before dawn with the gray house
dancing in phantom glory before their dazzled eyes.
THE SOUL OF GLORIA
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 naïve 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?"
"I'm coming to that. As I told you--or did I tell you?--he was mighty
good-looking: big brown honest eyes and one of those smiles that
guarantee the heart behind it is twenty-karat gold. Being young and
credulous, I thought he had some discretion, so I kissed him fervently
one night when we were riding around after a dance at the Homestead at
Hot Springs. It had been a wonderful week, I remember--with the most
luscious trees spread like green lather, sort of, all over the valley
and a mist rising out of them on October mornings like bonfires lit to
turn them brown--"
"How about your friend with the ideals?" interrupted Anthony.
"It seems that when he kissed me he began to think that perhaps he could
get away with a little more, that I needn't be 'respected' like this
Beatrice Fairfax glad-girl of his imagination."
"What'd he do?"
"Not much. I pushed him off a sixteen-foot embankment before he was well
started."
"Hurt him?" inquired Anthony with a laugh.
"Broke his arm and sprained his ankle. He told the story all over Hot
Springs, and when his arm healed a man named Barley who liked me fought
him and broke it over again. Oh, it was all an awful mess. He threatened
to sue Barley, and Barley--he was from Georgia--was seen buying a gun in
town. But before that mama had dragged me North again, much against my
will, so I never did find out all that happened--though I saw Barley
once in the Vanderbilt lobby."
Anthony laughed long and loud.
"What a career! I suppose I ought to be furious because you've kissed so
many men. I'm not, though."
At this she sat up in bed.
"It's funny, but I'm so sure that those kisses left no mark on me--no
taint of promiscuity, I mean--even though a man once told me in all
seriousness that he hated to think I'd been a public drinking glass."
"He had his nerve."
"I just laughed and told him to think of me rather as a loving-cup that
goes from hand to hand but should be valued none the less."
"Somehow it doesn't bother me--on the other hand it would, of course, if
you'd done any more than kiss them. But I believe _you're_ absolutely
incapable of jealousy except as hurt vanity. Why don't you care what
I've done? Wouldn't you prefer it if I'd been absolutely innocent?"
"It's all in the impression it might have made on you. _My_ kisses were
because the man was good-looking, or because there was a slick moon, or
even because I've felt vaguely sentimental and a little stirred. But
that's all--it's had utterly no effect on me. But you'd remember and let
memories haunt you and worry you."
"Haven't you ever kissed any one like you've kissed me?"
"No," she answered simply. "As I've told you, men have tried--oh, lots
of things. Any pretty girl has that experience.... You see," she
resumed, "it doesn't matter to me how many women you've stayed with in
the past, so long as it was merely a physical satisfaction, but I don't
believe I could endure the idea of your ever having lived with another
woman for a protracted period or even having wanted to marry some
possible girl. It's different somehow. There'd be all the little
intimacies remembered--and they'd dull that freshness that after all is
the most precious part of love."
Rapturously he pulled her down beside him on the pillow.
"Oh, my darling," he whispered, "as if I remembered anything but your
dear kisses."
Then Gloria, in a very mild voice:
"Anthony, did I hear anybody say they were thirsty?"
Anthony laughed abruptly and with a sheepish and amused grin got out of
bed.
"With just a _little_ piece of ice in the water," she added. "Do you
suppose I could have that?"
Gloria used the adjective "little" whenever she asked a favor--it made
the favor sound less arduous. But Anthony laughed again--whether she
wanted a cake of ice or a marble of it, he must go down-stairs to the
kitchen.... Her voice followed him through the hall: "And just a
_little_ cracker with just a _little_ marmalade on it...."
"Oh, gosh!" sighed Anthony in rapturous slang, "she's wonderful, that
girl! She _has_ it!"
"When we have a baby," she began one day--this, it had already been
decided, was to be after three years--"I want it to look like you."
"Except its legs," he insinuated slyly.
"Oh, yes, except his legs. He's got to have my legs. But the rest of him
can be you."
"My nose?"
Gloria hesitated.
"Well, perhaps my nose. But certainly your eyes--and my mouth, and I
guess my shape of the face. I wonder; I think he'd be sort of cute if he
had my hair."
"My dear Gloria, you've appropriated the whole baby."
"Well, I didn't mean to," she apologized cheerfully.
"Let him have my neck at least," he urged, regarding himself gravely in
the glass. "You've often said you liked my neck because the Adam's apple
doesn't show, and, besides, your neck's too short."
"Why, it is _not_!" she cried indignantly, turning to the mirror, "it's
just right. I don't believe I've ever seen a better neck."
"It's too short," he repeated teasingly.
"Short?" Her tone expressed exasperated wonder.
"Short? You're crazy!" She elongated and contracted it to convince
herself of its reptilian sinuousness. "Do you call _that_ a short neck?"
"One of the shortest I've ever seen."
For the first time in weeks tears started from Gloria's eyes and the
look she gave him had a quality of real pain.
"Oh, Anthony--"
"My Lord, Gloria!" He approached her in bewilderment and took her elbows
in his hands. "Don't cry, _please_! Didn't you know I was only kidding?
Gloria, look at me! Why, dearest, you've got the longest neck I've ever
seen. Honestly."
Her tears dissolved in a twisted smile.
"Well--you shouldn't have said that, then. Let's talk about the b-baby."
Anthony paced the floor and spoke as though rehearsing for a debate.
"To put it briefly, there are two babies we could have, two distinct and
logical babies, utterly differentiated. There's the baby that's the
combination of the best of both of us. Your body, my eyes, my mind, your
intelligence--and then there is the baby which is our worst--my body,
your disposition, and my irresolution."
"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 END OF A CHAPTER
The car was at length repaired and with a deliberate vengeance took up
where it left off the business of causing infinite dissension. Who