“Why—gosh— I’ll ’phone her—darn’ nice of you to ask us—”
It was not till melancholy dusk, when Leora had accepted and promised to bring with her a probationer-nurse named Nelly Byers, that Martin began to brood:
“Wonder if he did have a headache last night?
“Wonder if somebody gave him the tickets?
“Why didn’t he ask Dad Silva’s daughter to go with us? Does he think Leora is some tart I’ve picked up?
“Sure, he never really quarrels with anybody—wants to keep us all friendly, so we’ll send him surgical patients some day when we’re hick G. P.’s and he’s a Great and Only.
“Why did I crawl down so meekly?
“I don’t care! If Leora enjoys it— Me personally, I don’t care two hoots for all this trotting around— Though of course it isn’t so bad to see pretty women in fine clothes, and be dressed as good as anybody— Oh, I don’t know!”
VI
In the slightly Midwestern city of Zenith, the appearance of a play “with the original New York cast” was an event. (What play it was did not much matter.) The Dodsworth Theatre was splendid with the aristocracy from the big houses on Royal Ridge. Leora and Nelly Byers admired the bloods—graduates of Yale and Harvard and Princeton, lawyers and bankers, motor-manufacturers and inheritors of real estate, virtuosi of golf, familiars of New York—who with their shrill and glistening women occupied the front rows. Miss Byers pointed out the Dodsworths, who were often mentioned in Town Topics.