Oliver smiled rather wryly. He wondered if that was at all like what Ted might have thought when he and Nancy—But that wasn't comparable in the least. But Nancy and he were different. Nancy—and with that, the pain came so dazzlingly for a minute that Oliver had to shut his eyes to bear it—and something that wasn't just stupidly rude had to be said to Juliet Bellamy in answer to her loud clear question as to whether he was falling asleep.
All up to and through Labor Day Oliver bluffed and manoeuvered like the head of a small but vicious Balkan State in an International Congress for Ted and Elinor, and towards tea-time, decided sardonically that it was quite time his adopted infants took any further responsibilities off his shoulders. There was no use delaying conclusions any longer—Oliver felt as he looked at his victims like a workmanlike god who simply must finish the rough draft of the particular world he is fussing with before sunset, in spite of all rebellious or slipshod qualities in its clay. There would be a dance that evening. There would be, Oliver thought with some proprietary pride, a large sentimental moon. A few craftily casual words with Elinor before dinner—a real talk with Ted in one of the intermissions of the dance—a watchdog efficiency in guarding the two from intrusion while they got the business over with neatly in any one of several very suitable spots that Oliver had picked out already in his mind's eye. And then, having thoroughly settled Ted for the rest of his years in such a solid and satisfactory way—perhaps the queer gods that had everyone in charge, in spite of their fatal leaning toward practical-joking where the literary were concerned, might find enough applause in their little tin hearts for Oliver's acquired and vicarious merit to give him in some strange and painful way another chance to be alive again and not merely the present wandering spectre-of-body that people who knew nothing about it seemed to take so unreasonably for Oliver Crowe.
So he laid his snares, feeling quite like Nimrod the mighty, though outwardly he was only kneeling on the Piper porch, waiting for the dice to come around to him in a vociferous game of crap that Juliet had organized—he seldom shot without winning now he noticed with superstitious awe. And tea passed to a sound of muffled crumpets, and everyone went up to dress for dinner.
XXIX
Mrs. Winters' little apartment on West 79th Street—she heads letters from it playfully “The Hen Coop” for there is almost always some member of her own sex doing time with the generous Mrs. Winters. Mrs. Winters is quite celebrated in St. Louis for her personally-conducted tours of New York with stout Middle-Western matrons or spectacled school girls east for visits and clothes—Mrs. Winters has the perfectly-varnished manners, the lust for retailing unimportant statistics and the supercilious fixed smile of a professional guide. Mrs. Winters' little apartment, that all the friends who come to her to be fed and bedded and patronized tell her is so charmingly New Yorky because of her dear little kitchenette with the asthmatic gas-plates, the imitation English plate-rail around the dining-room wall, the bookcase with real books—a countable number of them—and on top of it the genuine signed photograph of Caruso for which Mrs. Winters paid the sum she always makes you guess about, at a charity-bazaar.
Mrs. Winters herself—the Mrs. Winters who is so interested in young people as long as they will do exactly what she wants them to—every inch of her from her waved white hair to the black jet spangles on her dinner gown or the notes of her “cultivated” voice as frosted and glittery and artificial as a piece of glacé fruit. And with her, Nancy, dressed for dinner too, because Mrs. Winters feels it to be one's duty to oneself to dress for dinner always, no matter how much one's guests may wish to relax—Nancy as much out of place in the apartment whose very cushions seem to smell of that modern old-maidishness that takes itself for superior feminist virtue as a crocus would be in an exhibition of wool flowers—a Nancy who doesn't talk much and has faint blue stains under her eyes.
“So everything went very satisfactorily indeed today, dear Nancy?”
Mrs. Winters' voice implies the uselessness of the question. Nancy is staying with Mrs. Winters—it would be very strange indeed if even the least important accompaniments of such a visit were not of the most satisfactory kind.
“Yes, Mrs. Winters. Nothing particularly happened, that is—but they like my work.”