“Then tell him you don’t want to lunch with him,â€� urged Karl, losing patience as a man will when some babyishly cherished woman-plan of his is upset. “Tell him you have to go to your sister’s or—â€�
“I can’t, Karl!â€� she declared; and she added, beseechingly: “Don’t be unreasonable, dear boy. Please don’t. And don’t be cross; it makes me so unhappy when you are. You know how hard I try to do everything you want me to—and how glad I am to. But I can’t get out of this luncheon. Phil especially wants me to be there. These Buffalo people are old friends of his.â€�
“Why should you have to go there, just because he wants you to?� demanded Karl, far more crankily than ever Daisy had heard him speak. “Why do you? You aren’t his slave.�
“No,� returned Madeline, her own temper beginning to fray, “but I am his wife. You seem to forget that.�
“I don’t forget it half as often as you do!� flashed Karl.
At which brutally truthful reply, the receiver of Apartment 60’s wire clanked down upon its hook. Nor could all of Karl’s repeated efforts bring Madeline back to the telephone.
Daisy Reynolds slumped forward upon the switchboard desk, her face in her hands, her slim body a-shake. She felt as though her every nerve had been wrenched. She was sick all over. This, then, was the wondrous romance in which she had reveled. This was the melancholy, beauteous love-story which had become part of her own colorless life! A vulgar intrigue between a married woman (not a wife, but a married woman—Daisy now realized the difference between the two) and a man not her husband!
The iridescent bubbles of romance burst into thinnest air. Daisy was numb with the horror and disgust of it all. Even of old she had fastidiously refused to listen in when another girl’s merry cry of “Fish!� had told that some such illicit dialogue was on the wire. And now, for weeks, she had been raptly listening to just such talks.
She loathed herself for the silly bubbles she had blown. Their lovely sheen was miasmic slime. They were filled with foul gases. A great shame possessed Daisy Reynolds.
Next morning Daisy came to work swollen-eyed from futile crying over the death of her dreams, and dull-headed from too little sleep. Half an hour later, promptly at nine, Karl called up Apartment 60.