“Yes, because Gay can always find me something”––brightening. “And tell me, how is the salon fresco coming on?”
Her father held up his hands in protest. “Ask something easy. A mob of workmen and sleek gentlemen that tiptoe about like undertakers’ assistants––that’s all I know. But not one of them touches my room!”
“All right, papa.” She kissed him prettily. “And as I’m dead for sleep and aunty is snoring in her chair, suppose you wake her up and run along?”
Summoning Aunt Belle, who was approaching the Mrs. Skewton stage of wanting a continuous rose-curtain effect, Beatrice stood at the window with unusual affection to wave the last of her guests a good-bye.
She sat up until daylight, to her maid’s dismay, still in her remodelled wedding gown. She was thinking chaotic, rebellious, ridiculous nothings, punctuated with uneven ragged thoughts about matching gloves to gowns or getting potted goose livers at the East-Side store Trudy had just recommended. The general trend of her reverie was the dissatisfaction not over this first year of married life but at the twenty-seven years as a Gorgeous Girl, the disappointment at not having some vital impelling thing to do, which should of course supply a good time as well as a desirable achievement. The inherited energy was demanding an outlet. She recalled the evening’s entertainment––a paper chase with every room left littered and disordered, 178 her lace flounce badly torn, her head thumping with pain, the latest dances, the inane music, the scandal whispered between numbers, the elaborate supper and favours, the elaborate farewells––and the elaborate lies about the charm of the hostess and the good time.
She began to envy Steve as well as Trudy, Steve in his hotel busy with Labour delegates, wrangling, demanding, threatening, winning or losing as the case might be. She, too, must do something. She had finished with another series of adventures––that of being a mad butterfly. It was shelved with the months of a romantic, parasitical existence misnaming jealous monopoly as love, an existence which all at once seemed as long ago as another lifetime.
She would now be an advanced woman, intellectual, daring; she would allow her stunted abilities to have definite expression. Either she would find a new circle of friends or else swerve the course of the present circle into an atmosphere of Ibsen, Pater, advanced feminine thought, and so on––with Egyptology as a special side line. She would even become an advocate of parlour socialism, perhaps. She would encourage languid poets and sarcastic sex novelists with matted hair and puff satin ties. She would seek out short-haired mannish women with theories and oodles of unpublished short stories, and feed them well, opening her house for their drawing-room talks. She would be a lion tamer! She was done with sighing and tears, belonging to the first stage of Glorious Girlism; and with pouting and flirting, which belonged to the second––she would now make them roar, herself included!
At noon the next day she sought Mary Faithful 179 in her office, to everyone’s surprise. To her own astonishment she discovered her husband busily engaged in conversation with some members of the Board of Trade, his travelling bag on a side table.
“I didn’t bother to telephone you or wire––I got in at eight this morning and came right up here. I knew you’d not be up,” he added, curtly. “Would you mind waiting in Miss Faithful’s office until I’m at liberty?”
Beatrice was forced to consent graciously and pass into the other room, where Mary was giving dictation.