“And about that article, never mind. I find I won’t need it.”
(Another confused murmur that might be construed as relief.)
“No, I’ve come to the conclusion you’re right. The book’s not the right stuff. If you praised it you’d probably have a hard time getting square with your conscience. So we’ll let it go at that. Good-bye.”
Then I slammed the receiver on the hook, feeling that I had gained more than I had lost.
By three o’clock everything had been done that could be done. I was on the point of giving a sigh of relief, when all at once I remembered two farewell calls I really ought to make.
“I’d almost forgotten them,” I said. “I must say good-bye to Mrs. Fitz and Miss Tevandale.”
CHAPTER IV
AN UNINTENTIONAL PHILANDERER
To believe a woman who tells you her age is twenty-nine is to show a naïve confidence in her veracity. Twenty-nine is an almost impossible age. No woman is twenty-nine for more than one year, yet by a process of elasticity it is often made to extend over half a dozen. True, the following years are insolent, unworthy of acknowledgment, best punished by being haughtily ignored. For to rest on twenty-nine as long as she dare is every woman’s right.
Mrs. Fitzbarrington had been twenty-nine for four or five years, but if she had said thirty-nine, no one would have expressed particular surprise. However, there were reasons. Captain Fitzbarrington, who was in receipt of a monthly allowance, had been engaged for some years in a book entitled The Beers of America, the experimental investigations for which absorbed the greater part of his income. Mrs. Fitz, then, had a hard time of it, and it was wonderful how she managed to dress so well and keep on smiling.
She received me in the rather faded drawing-room of the house in Harlem. She herself was rather faded, with pale, sentimental eyes, and a complex complexion. How pathetic is the woman of thirty, who, feeling youth with all that it means slipping away from her, makes a last frantic fight to retain it! Mrs. Fitz, on this occasion, was just a little more faded, a little more restored, a little more thirty-ninish than usual; and she welcomed me with a little more than her usual warmth.