When a Man Marries | Page 6

that dinner a
success. I canceled a theater engagement, and I took the Mercer girls in
the electric brougham father had given me for Christmas. Their
chauffeur had been gone for hours with their machine, and they had
telephoned all the police stations without success. They were afraid that
there had been an awful smash; they could easily have replaced Bartlett,
as Lollie said, but it takes so long to get new parts for those foreign
cars.
Jim had a house well up-town, and it stood just enough apart from the
other houses to be entirely maddening later. It was a three-story affair,
with a basement kitchen and servants' dining room. Then, of course,
there were cellars, as we found out afterward. On the first floor there
was a large square hall, a formal reception room, behind it a big living
room that was also a library, then a den, and back of all a Georgian
dining room, with windows high above the ground. On the top floor
Jim had a studio, like every other one I ever saw--perhaps a little
mussier. Jim was really a grind at his painting, and there were cigarette
ashes and palette knives and buffalo rugs and shields everywhere. It is
strange, but when I think of that terrible house, I always see the halls,
enormous, covered with heavy rugs, and stairs that would have taken
six housemaids to keep in proper condition. I dream about those stairs,
stretching above me in a Jacob's ladder of shining wood and Persian
carpets, going up, up, clear to the roof.
The Dallas Browns walked; they lived in the next block. And they
brought with them a man named Harbison, that no one knew. Anne said
he would be great sport, because he was terribly serious, and had the

most exaggerated ideas of society, and loathed extravagance, and built
bridges or something. She had put away her cigarettes since he had
been with them--he and Dallas had been college friends--and the only
chance she had to smoke was when she was getting her hair done. And
she had singed off quite a lot--a burnt offering, she called it.
"My dear," she said over the telephone, when I invited her, "I want you
to know him. He'll be crazy about you. That type of man, big and
deadly earnest, always falls in love with your type of girl, the appealing
sort, you know. And he has been too busy, up to now, to know what
love is. But mind, don't hurt him; he's a dear boy. I'm half in love with
him myself, and Dallas trots around at his heels like a poodle."
But all Anne's geese are swans, so I thought little of the Harbison man
except to hope that he played respectable bridge, and wouldn't mark the
cards with a steel spring under his finger nail, as one of her "finds" had
done.
We all arrived about the same time, and Anne and I went upstairs
together to take off our wraps in what had been Bella's dressing room.
It was Anne who noticed the violets.
"Look at that!" she nudged me, when the maid was examining her wrap
before she laid it down. "What did I tell you, Kit? He's still quite mad
about her."
Jim had painted Bella's portrait while they were going up the Nile on
their wedding trip. It looked quite like her, if you stood well off in the
middle of the room and if the light came from the right. And just
beneath it, in a silver vase, was a bunch of violets. It was really
touching, and violets were fabulous. It made me want to cry, and to
shake Bella soundly, and to go down and pat Jim on his generous
shoulder, and tell him what a good fellow I thought him, and that Bella
wasn't worth the dust under his feet. I don't know much about
psychology, but it would be interesting to know just what effect those
violets and my sympathy for Jim had in influencing my decision a half
hour later. It is not surprising, under the circumstances, that for some
time after the odor of violets made me ill.

We all met downstairs in the living room, quite informally, and Dallas
was banging away at the pianola, tramping the pedals with the delicacy
and feeling of a football center rush kicking a goal. Mr. Harbison was
standing near the fire, a little away from the others, and he was all that
Anne had said and more in appearance. He was tall--not too tall, and
very straight. And after one got past the oddity of his face being
bronze-colored above his white collar, and of his brown hair being
sun-bleached on top until it was almost yellow, one realized