At first Patience was horrified. She wondered what Mr. and Mrs. Peele would say. Beverly’s comments were not within the limitations of doubt.
“I’m in for it,” she thought. Then she smiled. She felt the same thrill she had experienced when the men looked askance at her after her assault upon her mother. The Ego ever lifts its head at the first caress, and quickly becomes as insatiable as a child for sweets. Patience glanced at the article to note how many times her name—in small capitals—sprang forth to meet her eyes. She imagined Bourke reading it, and Mrs. Gallatin, and Mrs. Lafarge, and many others, and wondered if strangers would find it interesting; then, suddenly, she threw back her head and laughed aloud.
“What fools we mortals be!” she thought. “And the President of the United States has dozens of paragraphs written about him every day. And actors and writers are paragraphed ad nauseam. If a woman is run over in the street she has a column, and if she goes to a hotel and commits suicide, she has two, and is a raving beauty. Rosita is persecuted for stories. The Ego ought to have its ears boxed every morning, as some old-fashioned people switch their children. Well, here comes Beverly.”
Her husband entered, and for the first time in many months she sprang to her feet and gave him a little peck on his cheek. He was so surprised that he forgot to pick up the newspaper, and followed her at once into the dining-room. During the meal she talked of his horses and his farm, and even offered to take a drive with him. He was going to White Plains to look at some blooded stock which was to be sold at auction, and promptly invited her to accompany him; but her diplomacy had its limits, and she declined. However, he went from the table in high good humour. When she left him in the library, a few moments later, he was arranging the scattered sheets of the “Day,” without his accustomed comments upon “the infernal manner in which a woman always left a newspaper.”
Patience went up to her room and wrote a note of apology to Miss Beale. She was half way through a long letter to Hal when she heard Beverly bounding up the stair three steps at a time.
“The cyclone struck Peele Manor at 10.25,” she said, looking at the clock. “Sections of the fair—”
Beverly burst in without ceremony.
“What the hell does this mean?” he cried, brandishing the newspaper. His dilating nostrils were livid. The rest of his face was almost black.
“Beverly, you will certainly have apoplexy or burst a blood vessel,” said his wife, solicitously. “Think of those that love you and preserve yourself—”
“Those that love me be damned! The idea of my wife—my wife—being the heroine of a vulgar newspaper story! Her name out in a headline! Mrs. Beverly Peele! My God!”