“Yes, he’s the most unspeakable beast I ever saw. Oh, by-the-way, mamma, I was telling them about meeting Mr. and Mrs. Nims, this afternoon. Kitten and Hal and I had to go over to the house to get some rugs and things for the play, in the college chapel, and Adelaide opened the door for us.”
“You don’t mean— How did she treat you?”
“Oh, all right. She didn’t know me from anybody else.... But she’s coming to help coach us, the night of dress rehearsal. Mrs. Henderson said, in her talk, that most of the charm in that Sargent portrait was the technique—brush work and colour arrangement. But Adelaide Nims doesn’t need Johnny Sargent or any other artist to tell her how to colour up. She had on an embroidered Chinese robe—the kind the Mandarin women wear in the house—pinkish tan, with a wide band of blue around the sleeves and neck—the kind of blue that fairly made her hair flame. I wanted to eat her, she was so beautiful. And just then I got a glimpse of her husband, through the window. He was sprawled all over a lawn bench that was built to hold three decent-sized people, and his stomach came out like the side of the rain barrel. I was trying to get a good look at his face, when he began to yawn—you know, the kind of a yawn that ate up all the rest of his features. I wanted to giggle ... or scream! And when he finally came into the house, and Kitten and I met him, I couldn’t think of a thing but that awful cavern inside his mouth. Gee! I’d hate to have to live with a man who looks like a hogshead, split down the middle, and an Edam cheese for a head—and no neck at all.”
“I didn’t suppose the nobility looked like that,” Mrs. Trench snapped.
“Humph! He’s only a younger son—and nine brothers and nephews between him and a handle to his name. Adelaide must have been in an awful tight pinch to have married him, money or no money.”
“He may not have been so stout when he courted her,” David ventured. “When your mother married me, no one would have thought of calling me her ‘better three-quarters’—and look at us now.”
“Other three-quarters,” Lavinia corrected. “I never could see the justice in calling a man his wife’s ‘better’ half.”
“There’s historical warrant for your objection, mamma,” Lary said, hoping to avert the revelation his mother was all too prone to make—her callous contempt for David in particular and men as a class.
“You don’t mean the tiresome old story of Adam and the rib,” Eileen demurred.
“Nothing like that. I found the story in some elective Greek we were reading, my third year in college. And as you describe this Mr. Nims, he seems to fit the original model. Seven of us were selected to translate the Symposium of Plato, and I had the story Aristophanes was said to have told at that memorable banquet. It was in response to the toast, ‘The Origin of Love.’ As the gods planned the world, there was no such thing as love. But they had created a race of terribly efficient mortals—hermaphroditic beings, man and woman in one body, their faces looking in opposite directions. They had four legs and a double pair of arms, and when they wanted to go somewhere in a hurry, they rolled over and over, like an exaggerated cart wheel, touching all their hands and feet to the ground in succession. They could see what was going on behind them, and could throw missiles in two directions at the same time.