“What a disagreeable voice he has.”
Adelaide stared. “Who?”
“The peacock,” said Jane.
Then Eloise and Edith came in, and presently the men, and Lucy and Del from a trip to the small porkers, and Adelaide going out with Del to dinner was uncomfortably aware that Jane had either artlessly or artfully refused to discuss with her the women who had been loved by Frederick Towne!
The dinner was delicious. “Our farm products,” Delafield boasted. Even the fish, it seemed, he had caught that morning, motoring over to the river and bringing them back to be split and broiled and served with little new potatoes. There was chicken and asparagus, small cream cheeses with the salad, heaped-up berries in a Royal Worcester bowl, roses from the garden. “All home-grown,” said the proud new husband.
Jane ate with little appetite. She had refused to discuss with Adelaide the former heart affairs of her betrothed, but the words rang in her ears, “The women that Ricky has loved.”
Jane was young. And to youth, love is for the eternities. The thought of herself as one of a succession of Dulcineas was degrading. She was restless and unhappy. It was useless to assure herself that Towne had chosen her above all the rest. She was not sophisticated enough to assume that it is, perhaps, better to be a man’s last love than his first. That Towne had made it possible for any woman to speak of him as Adelaide spoke, seemed to Jane to drag her own relation to him in the dust.
The strength of the wind increased. The table was sheltered by the house, but at last Delafield decided, “We’d better go in. The rain is coming. We can have our coffee in the hall.”
Their leaving had the effect of a stampede. Big drops splashed into the plates. The men servants and maids scurried to the rescue of china and linen.
The draperies of the women streamed in the wind. Adelaide’s tulle was a banner of green and blue. The peacock came swiftly up the walk, crying raucously, and found a sheltered spot beneath the steps.