Felix shut the door.
“Well, this is over, anyway!” said Rose-Ann, walking back behind the screen, and kicking off her pumps.
Felix followed her. “What’s over?”
“This party,” she said, letting down her hair. “A lot of cleaning tomorrow, and then—never again.... Felix, I don’t want you to be a perfect host, after all. You don’t have to be anything you don’t want to be.”
“But about Phyllis,” he said. “Surely you aren’t cold-bloodedly considering her becoming the mistress of that old—”
“Poets don’t have mistresses nowadays,” said Rose-Ann, impersonally, “at least, in Chicago. They have flirtations—and ‘affairs.’ An ‘affair’ may mean anything. Howard Morgan has been having ‘affairs’ for the last forty years. I was surprised that he didn’t have some pretty girl sitting on his lap tonight. He does it in such a fatherly way that nobody can object, not even his wife. After all, I repeat, it’s Phyllis’s concern, not mine.”
“You mean that she might be agreeable to such an arrangement?” Felix asked angrily.
“How do I know?” she said. “Put out the candle, will you, Felix?”
“I can’t understand you!” he said. “I thought you liked her?”
“I do,” she said. “At least, I’m willing to let her live her own life as she sees fit.”