“I didn’t want to come downstairs, so I sent for some lunch.” She watched Steve’s amused expression. “Aunt Belle gets on my nerves and unless we are having people in, the room is too big to have a family meal.”
On the tray was a dish heaped with tartlettes aux fruits, cornets à la crème, babas au rhum, petits fours, madeleines, and Napoléons. There was another dish filled with marrons glacés and malaga grapes preserved in sugar. A few faint wedges of bread and butter pointed the way to the pot of iced chocolate and the pitcher of whipped cream.
“Well,” Steve ventured, looking at the tray, “I’m afraid I don’t agree–––”
“I know your ideas. You think I ought to be frying chops for you and giving praise because I have a nineteen-dollar near-taffeta dress. I can just see you walking round a two-by-four back yard measuring the corn and putting the watermelons into eiderdown sleeping bags so they won’t freeze; then telling 262 everyone at the shop what an ideal home life you lead! No, deary, I’m retrenching because it’s a novelty, and you would like to retrench–––”
“Because I may be forced to do so. I hate to worry you––I never mean to unless there is no other way out––but I must warn you that the abnormal war conditions are no longer inflating business and everyone is watching his step. I cannot take your father’s place; he carved it out step by step. I fairly aeroplaned to the top and found that while I was sitting there in fancied security other people were busy chopping down the steps and I should find myself having a great old fall down to earth. Now–––”
“Don’t tell any more things,” she murmured, deep in a fruit tart. “I can’t understand. You are a big, strong man. Go keep your fortune; let me play. I’ll retrench for fun, and you must love me for it.”
“But you are not sincere,” he protested. “You don’t earn anything. You don’t save anything–––”
Beatrice sat upright, laying aside her plate and fork. “So you believe that, too,” she half whispered.
“See here,” Steve added, in desperation. “I wish we were back in the apartment––or a simple house. I wish we kept a cook and a maid and you had a simple outfit of clothes and a simple routine. I wish we were just folks––you know the sort––you don’t find them any place else but America––it’s a tremendous chance to be just folks if you would only realize. I feel as if this were a soap-bubble castle, as if we were deliberately playing a wrong game all round.”
“You tell papa,” she begged; “and if he thinks I’m unhappy he will write me another check.”