“None whatever,” said Mrs. Terry. “And, anyhow, it's a thing I shouldn't care to tell Natalie.”
“What do you mean, not care to tell Natalie?”
“Hard work doesn't make a man forget how to smile.”
“Oh, come now. He's cheerful enough. If you mean because Graham's fighting?”
“That's only part of it,” said Mrs. Terry, sagely, and relapsed into one of the poignant silences that drove old Terry to a perfect frenzy of curiosity.
Then, in January of 1918, a crisis came to Clayton and Natalie Spencer. Graham was wounded.
Clayton was at home when the news came. Natalie had been having one of her ill-assorted, meticulously elaborate dinner-parties, and when the guests had gone they were for a moment alone in the drawing-room of their town house. Clayton was fighting in himself the sense of irritation Natalie's dinners always left, especially the recent ones. She was serving, he knew, too much food. In the midst of the agitation on conservation, her dinners ran their customary seven courses. There was too much wine, too. But it occurred to him that only the wine had made the dinner endurable.
Then he tried to force himself into better humor. Natalie was as she was, and if, in an unhappy, struggling, dying world she found happiness in display, God knew there was little enough happiness. He was not at home very often. He could not spoil her almost childish content in the small things that made up her life.
“I think it was very successful,” she said, surveying herself in one of the corner mirrors. “Do you like my gown, Clay?”
“It's very lovely.”