"I have it! Why not Ann Elizabeth?"
"Great!" And whistled so through his shaving that his mouth was rayed with a dark sunburst of beard where the razor had not found surface.
They talked of housekeeping, reluctantly, it is true, because Mrs. Plush herself was fitting up, of hard-to-spare evenings, a basinette of pink and white. They even talked of schools.
Then came the inevitable time when Mrs. Jett lost interest. Quite out of a clear sky even the Blue Points were taboo, and instead of joining this or that card or sewing circle, there were long afternoons of stitching away alone, sometimes the smile out on her face, sometimes not.
"Em, is it all right with you?" Henry asked her once or twice, anxiously.
"Of course it is! If I weren't this way—now—it wouldn't be natural.
You don't understand."
He didn't, so could only be vaguely and futilely sorry.
Then one day something quite horrible, in a small way, happened to Mrs. Jett. Sitting sewing, suddenly it seemed to her that through the very fluid of her eyeballs, as it were, floated a school of fish. Small ones—young smelts, perhaps—with oval lips, fillips to their tails, and sides that glisted.
She laid down her bit of linen lawn, fingers to her lids as if to squeeze out their tiredness. She was trembling from the unpleasantness, and for a frightened moment could not swallow. Then she rose, shook out her skirts, and to be rid of the moment carried her sewing up to Mrs. Dang's, where a euchre game was in session, and by a few adroit questions in between deals gained the reassurance that a nervous state in her "condition" was highly normal.
She felt easier, but there was the same horrid recurrence three times that week. Once during an evening of lotto down in the front parlor she pushed back from the table suddenly, hand flashing up to her throat.