"Thrashed all what out?—Oh, I remember—your attentions to Lucy Fulton, or hers to you, which was it?"
"It wasn't our attentions to each other, as I remember. It was the attention which Aiken is or was paying to us."
"So it was," said my mother.
She gave me, then, a second cup of tea, and talked cheerfully of other things. Some people came in, and I managed presently to escape from them.
It hadn't been easy to tell my mother that I had given up the California trip. I knew that her triple intuition would connect the change of plan with Lucy Fulton, and I was not in the mood to meet such an accusation with the banter and levity which it no longer deserved.
Like it or not, I was staying on in Aiken because Lucy had asked me to. That we had been gossiped about had angered me; but it could do so no longer. That we were good friends, and enjoyed riding and being together, was no longer the whole truth. There was in addition this: that Lucy no longer loved her husband, and that she had made me her confidant.
From the first to the last of my dressing for dinner that night, everything went wrong. I stepped into a cold tub, under the impression that I had told my man to run a hot one. He had laid out for me an undershirt that had lost all its buttons, and a pair of socks that I hated. I broke the buckle of the belt that I always wear with my dinner trousers; I dropped my watch face downward on the brick hearth, and I spilled a cocktail all over my dress shirt, after I had got my collar on and tied my tie!
Usually such a succession of misadventures would have given rise to one rage after another. But I was too busy thinking about Lucy. I could no longer deny that she attracted me immensely. Perhaps she had from the beginning. I can't be sure. But I should never have confessed this to myself, or so I think, if I had not learned that she had suddenly fallen out of love with her husband. In that ideal state of matrimony, in which I had first gotten to know her, she had seemed a holy thing upon a plane far above this covetous world. But now the angel had fallen out of that which had been her heaven, and come down to earth. That I had had anything to do with this, I should even now have denied to God or man with complete conviction. I had no interest in the causes of her descent, only in the fact of it. And all that time of bungling dressing for dinner I kept thinking, not that I should help her look for a new heaven, but that I must try, as her true friend, to get her back into her old one. At that time John Fulton had no better friend than I. It seemed to me really terrible that things should have gone wrong with these two.
My father came in while I was still dressing.
"Hear you've given up California," he said bluntly; "do you think that's wise?… Where do you keep your bell?"