“Oh, she’ll get fed with that directly and trot home.” The woman locked her gaunt arms behind her careless hair and yawned at the amber moon above the clipped pines. “New York’s frightful! Stuffed middle westerners squatting in hotels trying to look smart. Place is absolutely run by women. Getting more respectable every time I go through. Haven’t had any patience with New York since the Stanford White murder. Imagine all the bloods running to cover and swearing they’d never even met White because he’d been shot in a mess about a woman! Imagine it! I always bought Harding Davis’s books after that because he had the sand to get up and say he liked White, in print. But that’s Egyptian history.” She began to cough fearfully. The pearls clattered on her gown.
“You’ve taken cold.”
“No. Cigarettes. Are you married?”
“Good lord, no. Only been twenty-one a couple of weeks.”
“How odd that must be! Twenty-one a couple of weeks ago. And you went to France and got shot. Singular child!”
“Why singular?”
“Oh, I’ve been amusing myself at Saranac—at a house party, with a social register and an army list. A war where eighty per cent. of the educated men—I mean the smart universities—the bloods under thirty all went and hid themselves. It’s not pretty.”
“Aren’t you exag—”
“Not in the least. I had fifty American officers convalescing at my husband’s place in Kent and half of them were freight clerks from Iowa. What can you expect when the American woman brings her son up to be a coward and his father makes him a thief? And naturally the women despise the men. Who on earth wants an American husband?”
“They seem to find wives, somehow.”