LUELLA ENTERTAINS
Bill stood on the south veranda and looked down upon the town, where smoke was rising lazily from bent stovepipe and brick chimney—the supper fires of Parowan's inhabitants—and away across the desert beyond, where the Funeral Mountains stood shoulder deep in purple shadows, the peaks smiling yet in rosetinted afterglow.
"Home!" he said between his teeth. "I made a mistake. I've only built a house. I'm a damned fool. It takes two to make a home."
Behind him came faint murmurs of talk, high-keyed laughter, little silences shattered suddenly by the refined babel of several women exclaiming in unison. The clink of china punctuating the pauses. Then, frank, uncompromising, came the voice of Luella, speaking with awful distinctness.
"What the hell! Damned bunch of gossips. Won't you ever settle down? Doris, for God sake listen."
A pause, then voices exclaiming once more. Slippered feet came tack-tack across polished floors, muffled on the rugs, clicking when the rug was passed. A ripple, rustle, quite close. Then silence. Without turning his head Bill knew that Doris was standing in the open doorway, looking at him in hot anger. Unconsciously he braced himself, his face setting into forced serenity.
It came.
"Bill, I wish to heaven you'd come and get that parrot! She's in there, walking up and down, looking at the floor and saying the most awful things! You'll have to explain it somehow to my guests—her calling them a bunch of damned gossips. It's beyond human endurance. She's talking something awful. I'll call a servant to take her out and wring her neck, if you don't come and get her. I mean that, Bill."
Bill clicked his teeth together and faced her, smiling. But in the pockets of his Palm Beach coat his hands were clenched, so that trimmed nails dug into flesh.