"Hurry up. Get your hat and powder your nose and pretty yourself up. Want you to feel at home. Mrs. Tom is some doll."
She hastened back to the room. He was like a kind older brother wanting to show her a good time, wanting her to show to the best advantage. She smiled at him when she again joined him in the lobby. "That better?"
He peered at her closely. "Much," he grunted and followed her through the swinging door.
They played bridge with the Thompsons.
Through the open windows the noise of the city came swelling up distractingly. The cards kept blowing from the table so that the men were busy gathering them up from the floor. Mrs. Thompson wore a lacy gown of lilac organdie cut quite low in the neck and her hair was arranged in an elaborate and immaculate coiffure that stuck out behind in huge, smooth, artificial-looking puffs. Her colour was high and not all her own. Her husband was of the type commonly called a "rough diamond," showing evident signs of hours spent in the barber's chair, with a sort of rawness about a blue-black chin, traces of talcum powder, and a lurking odour of toilet water. He was too big for his clothes, which were just a bit flashy, and he looked as though he might like to doff his coat.
Mary Louise and Claybrook arrived at eight-thirty. At eight thirty-five Thompson produced a flask from a desk drawer and mixed up a couple of high balls with an air of grave deliberation. The glasses were placed on the folding bridge table and remained there throughout the evening, Mrs. Thompson stooping over and taking delicate sips from her husband's glass every now and then.
The game languished. Mary Louise did not know much about it and the men would lapse into rather boisterous spells of conversation during which time the cards would lie on the table forgotten, and Mrs. Thompson would gaze at her husband with deep absorption and occasionally at Claybrook and sometimes at Mary Louise in a far-off, absent-minded way. And then they would ask each other whose deal it was and "How were the honours?" and then they would be at it again. Claybrook laughed at the slightest provocation, and seemed to pay a little too obsequious attention to whatever Thompson had to say, and after a while the conversation narrowed down entirely to the two men, with Mrs. Thompson contracting a glassy look in her pale-blue eyes beneath their fine-plucked brows. And at ten o'clock she stifled a yawn behind her handkerchief, threw down her cards, got up and went over to the corner where stood an expensive "Victrola."
"Let's have a little jazz," she said brightly. The men were busy discussing the income tax and the ways of avoiding it and did not seem to mind at all. And Mary Louise welcomed the suggestion with relief.
For another hour they sat back in deep chairs, relaxed, relieved of responsibility. And then Claybrook, straightening in his chair, said: "Think I'll have to get a new car. The old wagon's been losing compression. Hasn't any get-away at all these days." Then turning abruptly to Mary Louise who, sunk back in her chair, was absently dreaming, "What kind shall I get? You're the one to be pleased." The crow's-feet at the corners of his eyes gathered in tight little clusters and there was an odd pucker about his lips.
In spite of herself she flushed fiery red. There was in the tone a suggestion of proprietary claim that jangled on her. Almost without thinking she replied, "Joe Hooper's selling the Marlowe. It's the best make, isn't it?"