She dragged herself heavily on by my side. But her sobs ceased after the first flight. At the meager landing before her door she broke away and stood erect and faced me and held out her hand. The abruptness of the change in her awed me. I watched her push the hair from over her face and tilt her head back and shake it and gather the folds of the kimono nonchalantly together; and resume the old hard connoisseurship I had seen her exercise from the beginning. Her eyes dilated tensely, and her eyebrows went tensely up, and she gave me that envisaging smile as of yore.
“It was nothing,” she said, “quite nothing. Won’t you step in and wait?... I’m tired, I expect. I was alone here, do you see, taking my bath. The servants” (Mrs. Edgerton’s servants!) “hadn’t come. And that knock on the door upset me. I thought—I thought—it might be—the—the caterer” (she winced at the word, and the wince seemed to help her to proceed) “with the food. So I hurried out and down like mad.... Thanks awfully, though. You’ll be back, surely? Please do.”
I did go back, of course. I wouldn’t have missed it for worlds—sad as it was. There wasn’t such a long interval to wait, either. I wended my way, and found the theme-box closed, and returned at about quarter past five.
When I entered, the assemblage was in full swing, and Marian Haviland, in the black afternoon toilette she had sent to New York for in honor of Hurrell Oaks’s visit, was scintillating in the midst. She had donned her pearls, and subdued her cheeks unbecomingly, and tinted her lips; and, going from one person to another, she would, in response to the indiscriminating compliments they bestowed, just tap them each gaily on the shoulder with her fan and explain that:
“Mr. Oaks was so sorry, but he couldn’t wait. Yes, he was wonderful,” she would say, “perfectly. We had an immemorial hour together. I shall never forget it—never.”
To this day I don’t blame her for lying. If she hadn’t lied she never could have stood it. And she had to stand it. What else could she do? She couldn’t hang a sign on the door and turn the guests away after all their generous sacrifices to the occasion.
George Norton, needless to say, wasn’t there. She had forgotten—I insist upon that much—to ask him. But two days later she announced her engagement to marry him, and in another month’s time the knot was actually tied.
My companion stopped short there, and leaned back in her chair, expectantly staring at me.
“Like Marian Haviland Norton’s readers,” I said, “I should like some of the T’s crossed and the I’s dotted a little more plainly. Don’t spare me, either, as far as the ‘base rattle of the foreground’ is concerned. But tell me, please, literally just what you think happened.”