“And you’ve been getting cigar-ashes all over my nice clean floor, too,” said Rose-Ann. “Why will you never, never learn to use an ash-tray?”
“I’m sorry, my dear,” said her father with a twinkle at Felix, “but I thought this was a studio, and that people in studios did just as they pleased.”
“Well,” said Rose-Ann, “if you’re not going to be a preacher tonight, you can help Felix get things ready for the cocktails. I have a million sandwiches to fix, myself. Take off your coat and put on this apron. How do you like our studio?”
“I was very much impressed by those desks up in the front there,” he said disingenuously, smiling at Felix.
“Yes, that’s where Felix is going to write his play, and I’m going to do—I don’t know just what, yet. But isn’t it all—wonderful, father!”
“Wonderful!” said Rose-Ann’s father.
2
Whether it was the effect of that talk or not, all Felix’s recent social sophistication had vanished utterly, and the party passed after the usual fashion of such events to a shy and bewildered person. He made desperate efforts to remember people’s names, and succeeded once or twice; at other times Rose-Ann intervened and performed that painful feat for him; and once when he saw two people beside him who had not yet been introduced, and whose names he knew as well as he knew his own, but which he could not to save his life think of, he slunk away in guilty crimson shame. An old lady—it seemed to him that he was a favourite prey of old ladies—got him into a corner and talked to him for a long time about telepathy, and the life beyond the grave. He could not recall ever having seen her before, and he wondered what she was doing at his house-warming. “Yes,” he said earnestly to her—“yes!” So convincingly, that Rose-Ann, who wanted him to meet Professor Hedding of the University of Chicago, left him alone until at last she caught his piteous glance of appeal and came and bore him away. Howard Morgan was there, at ease as always, his leonine grey head the centre of a phantasmagoria which he seemed to understand, to rule with a glance, a smile, a word. He was enjoying it all.
“No,” Felix said to himself, “I shall never be like that!”
His father-in-law wandered up to him as he stood helplessly aside. He seemed to Felix to be about to ask, “And is this the kind of life you are going to lead?” But instead, he remarked, “Your friend Mr. Bangs is a very interesting young man. We had a good talk. I like the way his mind works.”