All this was amusing and colourful, perhaps, but scarcely conducive to tranquillity and repose. Often Magnolia, lying awake by the side of the sleeping man, or lying awake awaiting his late return, would close her stinging eyelids the better to visualize and sense the deep velvet silence of the rivers of her girlhood—the black velvet nights, quiet, quiet. The lisping cluck-suck of the water against the hull.
Clang! MO’nin’ pay-pes! Crack! E-e-eee-yow!
And then, suddenly, one day: “But, Gay dear, how do you mean you haven’t one hundred dollars? It’s for that bronze-green velvet that you like so much, though I always think it makes me look sallow. You did urge me to get it, you know, dear. And now this is the third time they’ve sent the bill. So if you’ll give me the money—or write a check, if you’d rather.”
“I tell you I haven’t got it, Nola.”
“Oh, well, to-morrow’ll do. But please be sure to-morrow, because I hate——”
“I can’t be any surer to-morrow than I am to-day. I haven’t got a hundred dollars in the world. And that’s a fact.”
Even after he had finished explaining, she did not understand; could not believe it; continued to stare at him with those great dark startled eyes.
Bad luck. At what? Faro. But, Gay—thousands! Well, thousands don’t last for ever. Took a flyer. Flyer? Yes. A tip on the market. Market? The stock market. Stock? Oh, you wouldn’t understand. But all of it, Gay? Well, some of it lost at faro. Where? Hankins’. How much? What does it matter?—it’s gone. But, Gay, how much at faro? Oh, a few thousands. Five? Y-y-yes. Yes, five. More than that? Well, nearer ten, probably.
She noticed then that the malacca cane was gone. She slipped her diamond ring off her finger. Gave it to him. With the years, that became an automatic gesture.
Thus the change in their mode of living did not come about gradually. They were wafted, with Cinderella-like celerity, from the coach-and-four to the kitchen ashes. They left the plush and ice water and fresh linen and rich food and luxurious service of the Sherman House for a grubby little family hotel that was really a sort of actors’ boarding house, on the north side, just across the Clark Street bridge, on Ontario Street. It was, Ravenal said, within convenient walking distance of places.