"He's not reticent, anyway," Marion said laughing.
"He just happened to mention it."
"Did you see his wife?" Emily asked them both.
"Eve told you she wasn't well. She wasn't there."
Martha looked at her mother, perplexed. Emily looked at her daughter uneasily. It was annoying of Martha to defend that man! If Emily had known he was to be on the links, she wouldn't have let Martha go to play. But now, of course the wisest would be just to let the matter drop. Martha was always so trustworthy. Certainly her good taste could be trusted.
Yet for some reason, when Johnnie Benton came that evening to take the three adorned girls to the dance, Emily was more impressed by him than ever. She felt so safe when Martha was under his care. She watched them drive away, and then went out to potter about as usual in the garden, just at dark. A neighbor came bringing her, in a strawberry box, a few rare seedling pansies, and together they made a little place protected from the heat in which they might be nursed. And then they went and sat down inside the screened veranda to escape the mosquitoes.
They were still talking there when Bob came. But he took his magazine and sat down a few chairs away, and they talked on as if no one was within hearing of their voices. And indeed no one was, for Bob habitually absented himself in the print before his eyes. He was unconscious of everything around him. Energetic, insistent demands and clamors could get only a muttered "Uh-uh!" from him. He really didn't know when the neighbor left, although he had sort of muttered at her.
So Emily sat still and alone in the darkness, and glad of the quietness. She thought over one by one the dozen men—Martha called them men, though they scarcely deserved the name—who would be dancing with the girls at the club. Emily knew every one of them; some of them she had known for years. She knew the families of most of them. Every time she thought of Martha's partner of the evening before, they seemed more acceptable to her. They were—decent. They were—secure. They had no foreign accent, and they had not pretended to know Tchekhoff. People gossiped about them, but Emily believed their relationships with bootleggers were merest flirtations. Their scrapes were ridiculous—like Johnnie's opera—-but they were not vicious—often. Bob called them "nail-polishers," and "shiny Johnnies," and thought pessimistically about their chances of success in this competitive life. But Emily, musing away, liked them all that night.
Bob threw down his magazine, after a while, and returned to Emily's presence. He got up and lit a cigar, and went into the house. Emily heard him there talking to some one by 'phone about insurance. He came out and sat down on the railing in front of her.
"Let's go to bed," he said.