Lee Randon nodded; he was measurably fond of her; he usually enjoyed a party at which he found Anette. That she liked him was very evident; not desperately, but enough to dispose of most restraint; she repeated to Lee what stories, formal and informal, men told her, and she asked his advice about situations always intimate and interesting.
The flood of voices, sustained on cocktails, rose and fell, there were challenges down the length of the table and quickly exchanged confidences. Bemis, publicly ingenuous, laid a light eager hand on his arm, and Mrs. Craddock answered a question in a decided manner. The dinner, Lee saw, was wholly characteristic of the club and its members: they had all, practically, known each other for years, since childhood; meeting casually on the street, in the discharge of a common living, their greetings and conversation were based on mutual long familiarity and recognized facts; but here, at such dances, they put on, together with the appropriate dress, a totally other aspect.
An artificial and exotic air enveloped whatever they did and said—hardy perennials, Lee thought, in terms Fanny's rather than his, they were determined to transform themselves into the delicate and rare flowers of a conservatory. Women to whom giggling was an anomaly giggled persistently; others, the perfect forms of housewife and virtue, seemed intent on creating the opposite engaging impression; they were all seriously, desperately, addressed to a necessity of being as different from their actual useful fates as possible.
The men, with the exception of the very young and the perpetually young, were, Lee Randon knew, more annoyed than anything else; there was hardly one of them who, with opportunity, would not have avoided the dinner as a damned nuisance; scarcely a man would have put his stamp of approval on that kind of entertainment. It was the women who engineered it, the entire society of America, who had invented all the popular forms of pleasure; it was their show, for the magnifying of their charms and the spectacle of their gay satins and scented lace; and the men came, paid, with a good humor, a patience, not without its resemblance to imbecility. Women, Lee continued, constantly complained about living in a world made by men for men; but the truth of that was very limited: in the details, the details which, enormously multiplied, filled life, women were omnipotent. No man could withstand the steady friction, the inexhaustible wearing, of feminine prejudice; forever rolled in the resistless stream of women's ambition, their men became round and smooth and admirable, like pebbles. This, he saw, in Fanny's loving care, was happening to him: she had spun him into the center of a silken web—
“You are not very polite,” Mrs. Craddock said.
“Are you a mind-reader,” he replied, “or haven't I heard you?”
“It doesn't matter,” she explained, “but you were so far away.”
He told her something of what had been in his thoughts, and she rewarded him with a swift speculative interest. “I hadn't realized you were so critical about your guinea hen,” she acknowledged. “Well, if what you say is true, what can you do about it?”
“Nothing,” Lee returned non-committally; “I am comfortable.” This, he instantly decided, sounded unfair to Fanny, and he substituted happy. Mrs. Craddock obviously was not interested in the change. “I get as tired of this as you do,” she asserted abruptly; “it's like being on a merry-go-round someone else started and can't stop. You have no idea how we get to hate the tunes.”
“But you mustn't forget the chance of catching a gold ring,” he reminded her.