“I didn’t like his looks,” George mumbled.
This wasn’t true. George had liked his looks, but he had resented (as must every man burdened with many perplexities) that gay and careless air. He looks as if he didn’t have a thing on earth to worry about, George thought. And he comes floating in here, with casual ease, among the thousand interlocking tensions of George’s difficulties, to gaze with untroubled eye on his host’s restless alertness. Or was this some sort of joke that Phyllis was putting over on him?
“I’m going to put the two older children on the sleeping porch, so Ben and Ruth can have their room. Miss Clyde will have to go on this couch.”
“How about me?”
“Well, we can sleep together I suppose. It won’t kill us, for a few nights.”
Not if I know it, George thought. That old walnut bedstead, with the deep valley in the middle, so that we both keep rolling against one another. Unless you clutch the post and lie on a slope all night. Besides, Phyl is so changeable in temperature. When she goes to bed she’s chilly and wants to kindle her feet against you. Then by and by she gets warmed up and it’s like sleeping with a hot bottle five feet long. On a night in July, too. Whenever I get comfortable, she wants to turn over on the other side; that brings us face to face. Impossible! How unexpected life is. If any one had told me, twelve years ago, that it would be so irritating to sleep in the same bed with a pretty woman, I wouldn’t have believed it. Phyl doesn’t like it either, yet she was annoyed by that booklet I wrote for the Edwards Furniture Company on The Joys of the Separate Bed. I’ll sleep on the window seat in the upstairs hall. No: that won’t do, if Miss Clyde is in the den she’ll have to be coming upstairs to the bathroom and Phyl won’t like me spread out there in public. It’s funny: sleeping is the most harmless thing people ever do, why are they so furtive about it?
But George rather liked the idea of Miss Clyde on his couch. It seemed, somehow, to add piquancy to a dull situation. To conceal this private notion, he argued against it.
“Miss Clyde will be a long way from the bathroom,” he said.
“There’s no other place to put her. You’re always talking about artists, their fine easy ways, I guess she won’t mind if someone sees her in a wrapper.”
She’d look charming in a wrapper, George thought. The queer little boyish thing! I can just imagine her. It would be blue, a kind of filmy blue crêpe. Coming up the stairs the morning sunlight would catch her, through those big windows: her small curves delicately outlined in a haze of soft colour, her hair tousled, a flash of white ankle as she reached the top step. He would sit up on the window seat, as though just drowsily awakened. Oh ... good-morning! Good-morning. What a picture you would make. Silhouette Before Breakfast. Life is full of so many heavenly pictures.... The bay window above the garden would be calm and airy in the before-breakfast freshness of July; the house just beginning that dreamy stir that precedes the affairs of day. She would come across to him ... he had hardly dared admit, even to himself, how far they had gone in imagination....