“What on earth are you reducing for?”
“You think I look all right this way?” she asked, pretending surprise.
Marjorie Ventusa hurried to the kitchen. She hated this pretty girl. All day long Robert Holton was with her. Perhaps even at night they were together. She pushed her blonde hair back out of her face. If only she had been pretty and young. Of course, she had been young but she had never been pretty. She was far from old now. They said that if one wanted something badly enough one would get it. That was foolish; Marjorie Ventusa had never gotten anything she wanted, except a yellow satin dress. When she was a child she had wanted a yellow satin dress and her father had bought her one. The dress was in a box in her closet now; she had not looked at it in fifteen years. She picked up a glass of grapefruit juice and put it on her tray.
The pretty girl was laughing when she came back to their table and Robert Holton was watching her. She wore a gray suit buttoned tightly across her small breasts.
“Here’s your grapefruit juice.”
“Thank you very much,” said the girl, paying no attention to Marjorie Ventusa, saying the words mechanically.
The waitress began to clean the table next to Robert Holton’s. She rubbed the gray damp cloth over the shiny black table-top and she listened to Robert Holton and the pretty girl as they talked.
“But Caroline” (her name was Caroline then), “I didn’t know you were expecting me last night.”
“Well, we weren’t really. I just thought you might come on over, that’s all. We had quite a gang. Jimmy Hammond, he was at Yale about the same time you were.”
“I went to Harvard.”