"What is it?"
He read the name out. Emily stood listening. It was the book that had shocked her so entirely years ago—the book about which she and Jim Kenworthy had quarreled so destructively.
"Haven't you read that?"
"No. I've heard of it."
"How intellectual of you! They make you read it, in most schools, that is, if you're interested in technique. You'd call it a thousand miles of sand. I haven't got any Robert Chambers," Eve went on, looking over possibilities. "You might try Michael Arlen, there. His style would be lost on you, but the subject would appeal to your heart. There's the Kreutzer Sonata. Have you read Crime and Punishment?"
"Can't stand Russian stuff."
"Does seem difficult, after the Saturday Evening Post," Eve remarked. Skirts may have clung to Johnnie, but Eve wasn't one of them. She had commented, on hearing of his masterpiece, that its music was hackneyed, the verse was rot and the theme disgusting. Martha had retorted that the theme, rather, was rot. Johnnie and Eve quarreled on till Eve departed.
"You're going to stay for lunch, Johnnie?" Emily asked.
"I won't if you don't want me to."
"How truly magnanimous!" Emily murmured. "No. You stay and talk to the girls, but don't stay for lunch. You know your mother wants you." Emily wondered then, and she wondered later, why Martha had wanted Johnnie to stay. Did she want him to hear what the Wright girls' mother was sure to say about the dressing room? Did Martha care really what Johnnie thought—Johnnie, who was always asking her to marry him?