“It’s a damned shame Walter married that chicken. But then, if he’s satisfied! Did you see her try to vamp me?” And he was off in a gale of chuckles.
Gradually, after a few weeks, they stopped trying to do things with Della. She had her little apartment with its expensive furnishings paid for by Mr. Warner and she and Walter kept an unceasing succession of exploiting maids and dined out at public places at least half the time. Cecily simply made the best of her. She was unceasingly busy at home. Ellen’s vacation had lengthened. She had written most contritely that she could not come back at once. “As soon as I can, but my cousin won’t have a nurse. We are trying to find one that will do her.”
Cecily made determined efforts not to let her household weigh on her. She told herself again and again that there must be ways to manage. She interviewed nurses and cooks, bribed employment agencies, but even with all her effort her mind could never escape from her house and her babies. The little grudge against Dick that he could escape, that he could want, as he so often did want, gayety and people, wore deeper in her.
CHAPTER XVIII
DICK HARRISON was R. G. Harrison in the Second National Bank Building. R. G. Harrison was increasingly important. He had started at twenty-five, looking after his dead father’s interests and fortune. At thirty-six he had taken his place among the young business men of the city who had made good and could contribute not only money, but also brains to the public benefit. He had been involved in various enterprises, all of them successful, but more and more he had withdrawn and concentrated lately on the mines in which Matthew Allenby and his company were interested. Dick and Matthew were constantly increasing their holdings, playing it together. Dick was director of the bank housed in the building where he had his office, and director of half a dozen companies; but his main interest was in the Lebanon Range mines.
If Cecily felt that Dick only half knew the difficulties she had in her house, it did not occur to Dick to counter that she knew little of the press of things that weighed on him through his business day—interests, worries, decisions, definite things. Little wonder that the intangible “something” which troubled Cecily could not impress him as serious. Serious things were the next tax on the mines, the threatened difficulties with labor agitators, the money tightness in the country. The business of the world, the business that kept food in people’s mouths, provided homes and motors and jewels and luxuries—that was real. He was becoming a little prone to dismiss Cecily’s tendencies to be easily “hurt,” to object to his desire for amusement of one kind and another, on the general premise that “women are queer.”
So he said to Matthew as they sat in his office one day after disposing of a host of details.
“Women are queer.”
“Original, aren’t you?”
“Well, I’m just beginning to find out that it’s true.”