The next day was a Saturday. Kedzie did not work. She was lonely for toil, and she abhorred the flat and the neighbors. The expressive parrot was growing tautological. Kedzie went out shopping to be rid of Gilfoyle's nerves. He was in travail of another love-jingle, and his tantrums were odious. He kept repeating love and dove and above, and tender, slender, offend her, defender, and kiss and bliss till the very words grew gibberish, detestable nonsense.
Kedzie wandered the shops in a famine of desire for some of the new styles. Her pretty body cried out for appropriate adornment as its birthright. She was ashamed to go to the studio a third time in the same old suit. She ordered one little slip of a dress sent home “collect.” She had hoarded the remnant of her Silsby dollars. When she reached home the delivery-wagon was at the curb and the man was up-stairs. Gilfoyle greeted Kedzie with resentment.
“What's this thing? I've got no money to pay it. You know that.”
“Oh, I know that well,” said Kedzie, and she went to the kitchen, where she surreptitiously extracted the money from the depths of the coffee-canister.
She paid for the dress and put it on. But she would not let Gilfoyle see her in it. She did not mind buying his cigarettes half so much as she minded paying for her own clothes. It outraged the very foundation principles of matrimony to have to pay for her own clothes.
Sunday was an appallingly long day to get through. She was so frantic for diversion that she would have gone to church if she had had anything fashionable enough to worship in. In the afternoon she went out alone and sat on a bench in upper Riverside Drive. A number of passers-by tried to flirt with her, but it was rather her bitterness against men than any scruple that kept her eyes lowered.
She would have been excited enough if she had known that the pictures in which she played a small part were being run off in the projection-room at the studio for Mr. Ferriday's benefit.
Everybody was afraid of him. The heads of the firm were hoping that he would approve the reels and not order them thrown out. They were convinced that they would have to break with him before he broke them. Mr. Garfinkel was hoping for a word of approval from the artistic tyrant.
But Ferriday was fretful and sarcastic about everything. Suddenly Miss Havender noted that he was interested, noted it by the negative proof of his sudden repose and silence. She could tell that he was leaning forward, taut with interest. She saw that Anita Adair was floating across the screen in the arms of Mr. Yoder.
There followed various scenes in which Kedzie did not appear, close-up pictures of other people. Ferriday fell back growling. Then he came bolt upright as the purring spinning-wheel of the projection machine poured out more of Kedzie.