Nona laughed. "You'd be bored anywhere. I wish another Tommy Ardwin would come along and tell you what an old cliché being bored is."
"An old cliché? Why shouldn't it be? When life itself is such a bore? You can't redecorate life!"
"If you could, what would you begin by throwing into the street? The baby?"
Lita's eyes woke to fire. "Don't be an idiot! You know I adore my baby."
"Well—then Jim?"
"You know I adore my Jim!" echoed the young wife, mimicking her own emotion.
"Hullo—that sounds ominous!" Jim Wyant came in, clearing the air with his fresh good-humoured presence. "I fear my bride when she says she adores me," he said, taking Nona into a brotherly embrace.
As he stood there, sturdy and tawny, a trifle undersized, with his bright blue eyes and short blunt-nosed face, in which everything was so handsomely modelled and yet so safe and sober, Nona fell again to her dangerous wondering. Something had gone out of his face—all the wild uncertain things, the violin, model-making, inventing, dreaming, vacillating—everything she had best loved except the twinkle in his sobered eyes. Whatever else was left now was all plain utility. Well, better so, no doubt—when one looked at Lita! Her glance caught her sister-in-law's face in a mirror between two panels, and the reflection of her own beside it; she winced a little at the contrast. At her best she had none of that milky translucence, or of the long lines which made Lita seem in perpetual motion, as a tremor of air lives in certain trees. Though Nona was as tall and nearly as slim, she seemed to herself to be built, while Lita was spun of spray and sunlight. Perhaps it was Nona's general brownness—she had Dexter Manford's brown crinkled hair, his strong black lashes setting her rather usual-looking gray eyes; and the texture of her dusky healthy skin, compared to Lita's, seemed rough and opaque. The comparison added to her general vague sense of discouragement. "It's not one of my beauty days," she thought.
Jim was drawing her arm through his. "Come along, my girl. Is there going to be any lunch?" he queried, turning toward the dining-room.
"Oh, probably. In this house the same things always happen every day," Lita averred with a slight grimace.