“But I like to have them when they’re skittish. Papa always used to let me take them.”
“Yes—well, these aren’t canal-boat mules, you know. Why can’t you be content just to sit back and enjoy the drive? You’re getting to be like one of those bloomer girls they joke about. You’ll be wanting to wear the family pants next.”
“I am enjoying it, only——”
“Only don’t be like your mother, Nola.”
She lapsed into silence. During one of their many sojourns at the Ontario Street hotel she had struck up a passing acquaintance with a large, over-friendly blonde actress with green-gold hair and the tightest of black bodices stretched over an imposing shelf of bosom. This one had surveyed the Ravenal ménage with a shrewd and kindly though slightly bleary eye, and had given Magnolia some sound advice.
“Why’n’t you go out more, dearie?” she had asked one evening when she herself was arrayed for festivity in such a bewilderment of flounces, bugles, jets, plumes, bracelets, and chains as to give the effect of a lighted Christmas tree in the narrow dim hallway. She had encountered Magnolia in the corridor and Nola had returned the woman’s gusty greeting with a shy and faintly wistful smile. “Out more, evenin’s. Young thing like you. I notice you’re home with the little girl most the time. I guess you think that run, run is about all I do.”
Magnolia resented this somewhat. But she reflected instantly this was a friendly and well-meaning creature. She reminded her faintly of Elly, somehow; Elly as she might be now, perhaps; blowsy, over-blown, middle-aged. “Oh, I go out a great deal,” she said, politely.
“Husband home?” demanded the woman, bluntly. She was engaged in the apparently hopeless task of pulling a black kid glove over her massive arm.
Magnolia’s fine eyebrows came up in a look of hauteur that she unconsciously had borrowed from Ravenal. “Mr. Ravenal is out.” And started on toward her room.
The woman caught her hand. “Now don’t get huffy, dear. I’m a older woman than you and I’ve seen a good deal. You stay home with the kid and your husband goes out, and will he like you any better for it? Nit! Now leave me tell you when he asks you to go out somewheres with him you go, want to or not, because if you don’t there’s those that will, and pretty soon he’ll quit asking you.”