“Then listen to me. I’ve borrowed a studio, a large barnlike studio on Washington Square, suitably equipped with pots and pans and kettles. Also, I am going to borrow the wherewithal to keep us going. It isn’t a bad kind of place if anybody likes it. There’s one dinky little bedroom for you and a cot bed for me, choked in bagdad. If you could kind of engineer the cooking end of it, with me to do the dirty work, of course, I think we could be quite snug and cozy.”
“I know we could, Uncle Jimmie,” Eleanor said. “Will Uncle Peter come to see us just the same?”
It thus befell that on the fourteenth day of the third month of her residence in New York, Eleanor descended into Bohemia. Having no least suspicion of the real state of affairs—for Jimmie, like most apparently expansive people who are given to rattling nonsense, was actually very reticent about his own business—the other members of the sextette did not hesitate to show their chagrin and disapproval at the change in his manner of living.
“The Winchester was an ideal place for Eleanor,” Beulah wailed. “It’s deadly respectable and middle class, but it was just the kind of 70 atmosphere for her to accustom herself to. She was learning to manage herself so prettily. This morning when I went to the studio—I wanted to get the lessons over early, and take Eleanor to see that exhibition of Bavarian dolls at Kuhner’s—I found her washing up a trail of dishes in that closet behind the screen—you’ve seen it, Gertrude?—like some poor little scullery maid. She said that Jimmie had made an omelet for breakfast. If he’d made fifty omelets there couldn’t have been a greater assortment of dirty dishes and kettles.”
Gertrude smiled.
“Jimmie made an omelet for me once for which he used two dozen eggs. He kept breaking them until he found the yolks of a color to suit him. He said pale yolks made poor omelets, so he threw all the pale ones away.”
“I suppose that you sat by and let him,” Beulah said. “You would let Jimmie do anything. You’re as bad as Margaret is about David.”
“Or as bad as you are about Peter.”
“There we go, just like any silly, brainless girls, whose chief object in life is the—the other sex,” 71 Beulah cried inconsistently. “Oh! I hate that kind of thing.”