With a white face of wrath Roger strode over the clothes and sat on the trunk. I have never believed that he could be ridiculous, my Roger hedged round with the dignity that is the Clements’ heritage, but he was then, boiling with rage, perched uncomfortably on the sloping lid. A hysterical desire to laugh seized me and I backed off to my chair, biting my under lip, afraid to speak for fear of exploding into a screaming giggle.
They were unconscious of anything funny in the situation, one too angry, the other too engrossed. With a concentrated glance she surveyed the trunk, directing the bestowal of his weight. When she had finally got him in the right place, she knelt, key in hand, and in answer to a curt demand he rose and flopped furiously down. To the protesting crunching of the hat box, the lid settled and the click of the lock sounded.
“Done,” she cried triumphantly, falling back in a sitting posture on the floor.
Roger got up.
“Have I your permission to go?” he asked with elaborate deference.
“You have,” said his hostess, and from the floor looked up with a bright and beaming face from which every vestige of bad temper had fled. “Good-by—good luck. And remember, the first performance I give in New York I expect to see you applauding in the bald-headed row.”
As the door shut on him my laughter came like the burst of a geyser. Lizzie, still on the floor, looking at me with annoyed surprise, made it worse. When she asked me in a hostile voice kindly to tell her what the joke was, it got beyond my control and I became hysterical. It wasn’t very bad—I always do things in a meek subdued way—but I laughed and cried when I tried to explain and laughed again.
When she saw there was no use ordering me not to be an idiot, she got up, grumbling to herself and began on the second trunk. She kept stepping round me carrying armfuls of clothes, trailing skirts over my knees, leaning forward from a kneeling posture to jerk blouses, cloaks and petticoats from the back of my chair. I tried to retreat into corners, but she worked in wide comprehensive sweeps, wherever I went coming after me to find something that was under my chair or upon which I was sitting. Finally she used me as a sort of stand, throwing things on me and plucking them off, muttering abstractedly as she worked.
I was recovering and she was inspecting a skirt outheld at arm’s length when she said musingly:
“I hadn’t the least idea Roger Clements was so bad-tempered. He’s just a self-sufficient cross-grained prig. Gets into a rage when I ask him to sit on a trunk. I can’t stand that kind of man.”