“Harv? Madden calling. Listen, Harv, send a car round right away, will you? Here, of course. No, home. Oh, charge it.”
Harvey expostulated in a mechanical, hopeless manner. “I got to tighten up on you, Madden. Listen to reason. Do you know what you owe here?... All right, but if you wait ten minutes, I’ll be home and run you up myself. Oh, all right. I’ll send Ben: he’s turning into the yard now.”
“Thanks. Look, I’ll pay right now.”
“You and who else?” asked his room-mate wearily.
Turning into the Stuart driveway, however, he solved the problem. Bob was standing on the porch superintending the parking of another car, and strolled down to meet the taxi.
“Got any change, Bob?” asked Madden: and the two bits were forthcoming. He walked into the house with a virtuous feeling, into a small crowd of people. Mrs. Saville-Sanders was perched on a window-seat, holding forth to Mrs. Lyons and a strange woman in a hat. Mrs. Lennard was talking to Phil Ray and stopped to smile at Teddy as he entered. Nothing wrong in that quarter, then: Blake was all right. There were other people just coming in; not very good friends of Bob, to judge by his attitude. Teddy poured himself a drink and sat down by Mrs. Lyons, who patted his arm in greeting.
She was a nice old thing, he told himself again. She was one of the few stands he took against public opinion. Most of the people in Santa Fé, that is, the people he ran with, made fun of her. She was not quite bright, they argued. It was always just a few minutes before they said anything really serious that Teddy would protest,
“Well, I like old Ruth.”
He really did. She was kindly, credulous and restful. She was generous. She was maternal. If she was a little smug, the only difference between her attitude and Mrs. Saville-Sanders’, he said to himself, was that she had less money to be smug about. The other thing was that she was a native daughter and had a tangible husband. He was a popular artist who took himself quite seriously and made a cottage-and-garden living by executing big colourful murals of Indians wearing the wrong kind of moccasins and shooting arrows at conventionalized mesas with all of the shadows on the same side.
Teddy would say, “Of course, Tommy’s work—but I like old Ruth.”