CHAPTER LIII
WILLIE had arranged for supper at home. As they left the theater and sped through the streets crowded with uncharacteristic mobs Persis thought longingly of the tango-hunts she had indulged in during the past season. But there was no one to dance with her now. And she realized that she would be impossibly conspicuous as a café-hunting bride with a husband who abhorred this whole chapter in the chronicle of diversion.
Alone with Willie in the Enslee palace, which Ten Eyck described as "a sublime junk-shop," Persis was oppressed to melancholia. The air that came in at the windows had a mournful breath. The peculiar aversion for the city, that overtakes New-Yorkers in the late spring seized her and shook her. The mansions neighborly to theirs were boarded up now, with only a caretaker's window alight here and there. There was nobody even to summon by telephone as a rescuing third party to make a crowd out of the appallingly tiresome duet with Willie.
"This town is a cemetery," she exclaimed, as she quenched her eighth cigarette stump. "Opening a house here now is like opening a grave in Woodlawn at midnight. You've got to take me away or leave me in Bloomingdale."
"What about Paris?" Willie suggested.
She remembered Ten Eyck's eyes, and said, "Let's make it London."
"I'll get what I can to-morrow. You wouldn't like to cross in the yacht?" he asked, haughtily. "Isolde's all right in the ugliest weather."
She shook her head violently, and yawned and spoke so eloquently of her fatigue that he slunk away to his own room.
The next day he set his secretary to work running down a berth on a steamer. Everything seemed to be gone. People whom the panicky times had reduced from wealth to anxiety were crossing the ocean to places where they could economize without ostentation. The final report was that the only suitable berth was the imperial suite on the new Imperator.
"Did you grab it?" said Willie. The secretary shook his head.