“Oh, no, you’re not! You don’t care a rap about my work and my plans. I don’t exactly want you to. You haven’t anything to do with everyday life. You’re—you’re my love.”
“I’m afraid I’ll have to be awfully nice,” she said, “not to spoil all that.”
“No. It doesn’t matter what you do. You couldn’t change what I love so in you. It’s eternal.”
“Till death do us part!” she said, with a sombre little smile.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE HOUSEWARMING
§ i
AL didn’t say what he thought; it seemed to him a singularly infelicitous time for that. He was beginning to learn the rudiments of a lamentable sort of tact; he followed Andrée about the new flat and admired all that was pointed out to him; seven rooms and two baths, fronting on Riverside Drive, all furnished now and ready for their installation. Claudine had so urged them to have a home that she had won over Andrée, and according to his principle, he had yielded to Andrée. He said to himself, in his customary struggle to square facts with ideas, that it might be a woman’s instinct to have a home, and he was prepared to admit that women had almost all the instincts left to the race. He couldn’t quite classify the instinct that made her spend so much money on the furnishings; she wasn’t ostentatious, didn’t do it to “show off”—a thing he could have understood—she didn’t do it for him, nor was comfort her object. It was, he decided, her artistic desire for beauty.
Personally, he was ashamed of it. Riverside Drive itself had long been for him a sort of symbol; many, many times he had come to sit there and feast his eyes upon the opulent women with their pet dogs. As a fat man in a white vest and a silk hat typified the Capitalist, so was a stout, well-dressed woman with a Pomeranian the outward and visible sign of all this inward corruption of private life. He saw many such from his windows; there had been one that day in the very lift with him.
On the question of servants he had been firm. And had been diddled.