“But how about that purple negligée?”
“That was pure profiteering. I got into the mood of roasting the old marshmallow; the negligée was handy, you dropped in—Say, tell me about the visit. I haven’t half looked at you yet.”
They were in the living room, and Joy without answering went over to the cellarette. With a leap, Jerry was there before her. “Listen here, Joy—you’ve been without it for several days now. Don’t you think it’s a good time to begin to stop?”
“Why? You drink three times as much as I do——”
“I’m hopeless. You’re not. You’ve just started in, and you can stop—easily.”
Joy considered the lights and shadows of the glass in her hand. “I wonder—if it’s really doing me any harm.” She drank it reflectively, while Jerry went back to her seat with a shrug. “I—I cried a long time, the first night down at the seashore. Jerry, do you suppose this had anything to do with it?”
Jerry shrugged her shoulders again. Having made her appeal, she evidently did not intend either to repeat or reinforce it. There was a brief silence between the two, broken by Joy, who suddenly found that she must pour forth the story of the week-end just passed; such glowing wonder could not be bottled up within her. Jerry listened, first smoking at her usual gait, but as the story wore on sitting with a fresh cigarette unlit between her teeth. When Joy’s narration finally came to an end, she bit into the cigarette.
“Well?” said Joy. It was the first time she had ever approached Jerry with a serious matter, the first time men had entered their conversation as anything but incidentals to a good time, and she did not know how a hint of permanency would hit her.
“Well?” Jerry repeated. “What do you want me to say?”
“Say?” Joy’s look of breathless bliss crumbled as a toy balloon under a pin prick. “Why—why, nothing, if you don’t want to. I’m sorry—if I bored you about it. But you see—I owe him to you, in a way. Because I never would have met Packy if I hadn’t come here, and I never would have met him if it hadn’t been for Packy—I didn’t mean to bore you.”