That Mrs. Charity Givens had heard she was a great heiress, and meant to stick her for a new hospital. That Le Grand Paynter wanted to do her portrait, life size and full width, and that the Reverend Avery Goodman said she was very light on her feet for a fat woman.
The last made Warble mad and she made a face at Lotta and sent her home.
A rose-colored June day. Meringues of cloud floating on a sky of cerulean custard.
She crawled out for a walk. It was ninety-eight in the shade, too hot to run much.
She walked down Ptomaine Street, her nose shining, and pearly drops chasing each other down her back like rain on a car window pane.
In her tucked white dimity and ankle-ties, her pink sunbonnet and her tiny, frilled parasol, she was as much out of place in the aesthetic town as whipped cream on a grapefruit.
She circled the outskirts of the town, and noted the massive and imposing gateways to the great estates. She knew the grandeur inside, she had been there. Cubist landscapes, some of them, others were Russian steppes, and in one instance a magnate was having the ruins of an Egyptian temple excavated on his grounds, which he had previously with difficulty and at great expense had buried there.
She did not know what to do about it.
She felt, intuitively, that these men would resent her criticism of their homes. Yet she couldn't let it go on—this gigantic inutility, this mammoth lack of practical, efficient management.