"Never mind, Bessie!" she laughed. "He probably likes to work hard for you,—every man does for the woman he loves."
And then they would have luncheon, specially devised for Bessie's epicurean taste. For Bessie Falkner did devout homage to a properly cooked dish. Isabelle, watching the contented look with which the little woman swallowed a bit of jellied meat, felt that any man worth his salt would like to gratify her innocent tastes. Probably Falkner couldn't endure a less charming woman for his wife. So she condoned, as one does with a clever child, all the little manifestations of waywardness and selfishness that she was too intelligent not to see in her new friend. Isabelle liked to spoil Bessie Falkner. Everybody liked to indulge her, just as one likes to feed a pretty child with cake and candy, especially when the discomforts of the resulting indigestion fall on some one else.
"Oh, it will all come out right in the end!" Bessie usually exclaimed, after she had well lunched. She did not see things very vividly far ahead,—nothing beyond the pleasant luncheon, the attractive house, her adorable Isabelle. "I always tell Rob when he is blue that his chance will come some day; he'll make a lucky strike, do some work that attracts public attention, and then we'll all be as happy as can be."
She had the gambler's instinct; her whole life had been a gamble, now winning, now losing, even to that moment when her lover had ridden up to the hotel and solved her doubts about the rich suitor. In Colorado she had known men whose fortunes came over night, "millions and millions," as she told Isabelle, rolling the words in her little mouth toothsomely. Why not to her? She felt that any day fortune might smile.
"My husband says that Mr. Falkner is doing excellent work,—Mr. Freke said so," Isabelle told Bessie.
"And Rob talks as if he were going to lose his job next week! Sometimes I wish he would lose it—and we could go away to a large city."
Bessie thus echoed the feeling in Isabelle's own heart,—"I don't want to spend my life on an Indiana prairie!" To both of the women Torso was less a home, a corner of the earth into which to put down roots, than a way-station in the drama and mystery of life. Confident in their husbands' ability to achieve Success, they dreamed of other scenes, of a larger future, with that restlessness of a new civilization, which has latterly seized even women—the supposedly stable sex.
* * * * *
As the year wore on there were broader social levels into which Isabelle in company with Bessie dipped from time to time. The Woman's Club had a lecture course in art and sociology. They attended one of the lectures in the Normal School building, and laughed furtively in their muffs at "Madam President" of the Club,—a portly, silk-dressed dame,—and at the ill-fitting black coat of the university professor who lectured. They came away before the reception.
"Dowds!" Bessie summed up succinctly.