This, as I have said, was the situation for one week after I had acknowledged my Constitutional Inability to Interfere—and on the eighth evening Felicia and I were to go to a large studio dance. I dressed with all the groans common, I believe, to the male animal out of temper. I interspersed my dressing with such remarks as:
“Felicia, I wish you would have them change the laundry man, this waistcoat’s beastly.”
I spoiled three ties in tying, I was sceptical of my clothes having been pressed, while Felicia proceeded unerringly, even with a certain pleasure, through the intricacies of her own toilet, looking more disturbingly lovely every minute.
Finally she remarked contemplatively:
“How do you suppose you ever got dressed in time for anything before you were married?” which was insulting, for I had only asked where two things were.
She put her head back through the door to say to me with an impertinent grin:
“Your hat, you know, is in its box on the shelf where it always is,” and she looked so pretty that an unreasonable desire arose in me to kill Monty Saunders, and I thought how terrible it must be to feel jealous, if one could feel as I did when one was only sore and sorry.
I mention this episode only to throw in greater relief what happened later that evening.
For later that evening a gay little person in fluffy green clothes danced inside the circles of our lives, and before she passed out she had cleared up the mist which encompassed us, unloosed my tongue, and softened Felicia’s heart, and all without being so much as aware of our existence.
Felicia and Lydia Massingbyrd and Cecilia Bennett and I were all sitting together on a commodious window-seat watching the dancers. It was significant of the uncomfortable state of our affairs that Felicia and I only recovered our gaiety and our naturalness toward each other when we had some one to serve as buffer between us; I was talking and laughing with the best, while deep down within me my other self gloomed, fairly smacking his lips over his dismalness, “How little do Felicia and Lydia 481 dream of the trouble gnawing our vitals,” when out of the midst of our chaff and gossip popped a word that hit me square in the solar plexus.