XVIII
"LITA? But of course I'll talk to Lita—" Mrs. Manford, resting one elbow on her littered desk, smiled up encouragingly at her daughter. On the desk lay the final version of the Birth Control speech, mastered and canalized by the skilful Maisie. The result was so pleasing that Pauline would have liked to read it aloud to Nona, had the latter not worn her look of concentrated care. It was a pity, Pauline thought, that Nona should let herself go at her age to these moods of anxiety and discouragement.
Pauline herself, fortified by her morning exercises, and by a "double treatment" ($50) from Alvah Loft, had soared once more above her own perplexities. She had not had time for a word alone with her husband since their strange talk of the previous evening; but already the doubts and uncertainties produced by that talk had been dispelled. Of course Dexter had been moody and irritable: wasn't her family always piling up one worry on him after another? He had always loved Jim as much as he did Nona; and now this menace to Jim's happiness, and the unpleasantness about Lita, combined with Amalasuntha's barefaced demands, and the threatened arrival of the troublesome Michelangelo—such a weight of domestic problems was enough to unnerve a man already overburdened with professional cares.
"But of course I'll talk to Lita, dear; I always meant to. The silly goose! I've waited only because your father—"
Nona's heavy eyebrows ran together like Manford's. "Father?"
"Oh, he's helping us so splendidly about it. And he asked me to wait; to do nothing in a hurry..."
Nona seemed to turn this over. "All the same—I think you ought to hear what Lita has to say. She's trying to persuade Jim to let her divorce him; and he thinks he ought to, if he can't make her happy."
"But he must make her happy! I'll talk to Jim too," cried Pauline with a gay determination.
"I'd try Lita first, mother. Ask her to postpone her decision. If we can get her to come to Cedarledge for a few weeks' rest—"