“It wouldn't be any better if I smoked more cigarettes or drank more gin, that would be silly.” Lee was startled by the similarity of her words to his unformed thought. “No one likes fun better than I do, but the fun now is so different,” her voice had the sound of a wail, “it's nothing but legs and getting kissed by anybody but your husband. I don't want other men to kiss me, Lee, only you. And I want you to be glad about that, to care for it more than anything else. You do, don't you?”
Again she hesitated, and again he assured her, in a species of annoyance, of his feeling.
“It's because I adore you,” Fanny insisted; “it may be awfully foolish and ark-like to say, but you're all I want, absolutely.” Her manner grew indignant. “Some women at tea today laughed at me. They did nothing but describe how they held their husbands' affections; actually that, as though it were difficult, necessary; the details were sickening, and reminded me of that old joke about leaving off your wedding ring. It was all too horrid! And, underneath, they were bitter and vindictive, yes—they were uneasy, afraid of something, of somebody, and treated every good-looking woman as a dangerous enemy. I couldn't live like that, I'd rather die: I told them they didn't trust the men they were married to.”
“What did they say to that?” Lee asked, standing in the door.
“Agreed with me. Alice Lucian said I was damned well right she didn't trust hers. She loved him, too, but she didn't propose to take any liberties with the sanctity of her bed. They all thought Claire was a fool to let Peyton see Mina Raff like that in New York—the way to avoid trouble was to make sure it couldn't begin. Has Peyton said anything to you about Mina Raff? She is perfectly stunning, of course, and an actress.”
“Not to me,” Lee told her; then he recalled the prolonged attention to Mina Raff on the divan at the Club. “What if he is crazy about her?” he observed indifferently; “it can't come to anything. It won't hurt Claire if Peyton sits out a few dances with a public idol.”
“I shouldn't think so either, but the others were so positive. I just told them how happy we are together and how devoted you are—fifteen marvelous years, Lee. It was plain that they envied us.” She rose and came close to him, her widely-opened candid blue eyes level with his gaze. “Not the slightest atom must ever come between us,” she said; “I couldn't stand it, I've been spoiled. I won't have to, will I, Lee? Lee, kiss me.”
He met the clinging thin passionate purity of her mouth. “No, certainly not, never,” he muttered, extraordinarily stirred. He asserted to himself that he would make no such fatal mistake. The other, the errant fancy, was no more than a vagrant unimportant impulse. “Don't let these women, who cat around, upset you; probably they are thinking not so much about their husbands as they are of themselves. I've seen that Alice Lucian parked out in a limousine during a dance, and she was going right to it.”
“It is foolish of me,” Fanny agreed, “and not complimentary to our love. I have kept you so long over nothing that you will be late for dinner. I don't care!” Her manner bore a foreign trace of abandon in its radiant happiness; and, with spread fingers on his back, she propelled him toward the stairs. But, in their room, he failed to change his clothes: he sat lost in a concentration of thought, of summoned determination.
The interior, with dotted white Swiss curtains at the large windows, both an anomaly and an improvement on the architectural origin, was furnished largely in dull rubbed mahogany, the beds had high slender fluted posts, snowy ruffled canopies and counterpanes stitched in a primitive design. He possessed an inlaid chest of drawers across from the graceful low-boy used by Fanny as a dressing-table; there was a bed stand with brass-tipped feet, a Duncan Fyfe, she declared; split hickory chairs painted a dark claret color; small hooked rugs on the waxed floor; and, against the mirror on his chest of drawers, a big photograph of Fanny and the two children in the window-seat of the living room.