We had dinner at seven. It was a well-ordered meal, but it went off rather dismally. I was depressed, for reasons I couldn’t quite fathom, and the children were tired, and Duncan, I’m afraid, was a bit disappointed in us all. Tokudo had brought 299 cocktails for us, and Duncan, seeing I wasn’t drinking mine, stowed both away in his honorable stomach. He ate heartily, I noticed, and gave scant appearance of a man pining away with a broken heart. After dinner he sat back and bit off the end of a cigar.
“This is my idea of living,” he proclaimed as he sent a blue cloud up toward the rather awful dome-light above the big table. “There’s stir and movement here, all day long. Something more than sunsets to look at! You’ll see—something to fill up your day! Why, night seems to come before I even know it. And before I’m out of bed I’m brooding over what’s ahead of me for that particular date and day—Say, that girl of ours is falling asleep in her chair there!”
So I escaped and put the children to bed. And while thus engaged I discovered that some of Duncan’s new friends were dropping in on him. I wanted to stay up-stairs, for my head was aching a lot and my heart just a little, but Duncan called to me from the bottom of the stairs. So down I went, like a dutiful wife, to the room full of smoke and talk, where two big men and one very thin woman in a baby-bear 300 motor coat were drinking Scotch highballs with my lord and master. They were genial and jolly enough, but I couldn’t understand their allusions and I couldn’t see the points to their jokes. And they seemed to stay an interminable length of time. I was secretly uncomfortable, until they went, but I became still more uncomfortable after they had gone.
For as we sat there together, in that oppressive big room, I made rather an awful discovery. I found that my husband and I had scarcely anything we could talk about together. So I sat there, like an alligator in a bayou, wondering why his rather flushed face should be turned toward me every now and then.
My heart beat a little faster as I saw him take out his watch and wind it up.
“Let’s go to bed,” he said as he pushed it back in his waistcoat pocket. My heart stopped beating altogether, for a moment or two. I felt like a slave-girl in a sheik’s tent, like a desert-woman just sold into bondage.
It was the smoky air and the highballs, I suppose, which left his eyes a little bloodshot as he turned slowly about and studied my face. Then he repeated what he had said before. 301
“I can’t!” I told him, with a foolish surge of terror.
He sat quite a long time without speaking. I could see the corners of the Holbein-Astronomer mouth go down.
“As you say,” he finally remarked, with a grim sort of quietness. But every bit of color had gone from his face. I was glad when Tokudo came in to take away the glasses.