When a Man Marries | Page 5

her maiden name again and had had an operation for appendicitis. We heard afterward that they didn't find an appendix, and that the one they showed her in a glass jar WAS NOT HERS! But if Bella ever suspected, she didn't say. Whether the appendix was anonymous or not, she got box after box of flowers that were, and of course every one knew that it was Jim who sent them.
To go back to the anniversary, I went to Rothberg's to see the collection of antique furniture--mother was looking for a sideboard for father's birthday in March--and I met Jimmy there, boring into a worm-hole in a seventeenth-century bedpost with the end of a match, and looking his nearest to sad. When he saw me he came over.
"I'm blue today, Kit," he said, after we had shaken hands. "Come and help me dig bait, and then let's go fishing. If there's a worm in every hole in that bedpost, we could go into the fish business. It's a good business."
"Better than painting?" I asked. But he ignored my gibe and swelled up alarmingly in order to sigh.
"This is the worst day of the year for me," he affirmed, staring straight ahead, "and the longest. Look at that crazy clock over there. If you want to see your life passing away, if you want to see the steps by which you are marching to eternity, watch that clock marking the time. Look at that infernal hand staying quiet for sixty seconds and then jumping forward to catch up with the procession. Ugh!"
"See here, Jim," I said, leaning forward, "you're not well. You can't go through the rest of the day like this. I know what you'll do; you'll go home to play Grieg on the pianola, and you won't eat any dinner." He looked guilty.
"Not Grieg," he protested feebly. "Beethoven."
"You're not going to do either," I said with firmness. "You are going right home to unpack those new draperies that Harry Bayles sent you from Shanghai, and you are going to order dinner for eight--that will be two tables of bridge. And you are not going to touch the pianola."
He did not seem enthusiastic, but he rose and picked up his hat, and stood looking down at me where I sat on an old horse-hair covered sofa.
"I wish to thunder I had married you!" he said savagely. "You're the finest girl I know, Kit, WITHOUT EXCEPTION, and you are going to throw yourself away on Jack Manning, or Max, or some other--"
"Nothing of the sort," I said coldly, "and the fact that you didn't marry me does not give you the privilege of abusing my friends. Anyhow, I don't like you when you speak like that."
Jim took me to the door and stopped there to sigh.
"I haven't been well," he said heavily. "Don't eat, don't sleep. Wouldn't you think I'd lose flesh? Kit"--he lowered his voice solemnly--"I have gained two pounds!"
I said he didn't look it, which appeared to comfort him somewhat, and, because we were old friends, I asked him where Bella was. He said he thought she was in Europe, and that he had heard she was going to marry Reggie Wolfe. Then he signed again, muttered something about ordering the funeral baked meats to be prepared and left me.
That was my entire share in the affair. I was the victim, both of circumstances and of their plot, which was mad on the face of it.
During the entire time they never once let me forget that I got up the dinner, that I telephoned around for them. They asked me why I couldn't cook--when not one of them knew one side of a range from the other. And for Anne Brown to talk the way she did--saying I had always been crazy about Jim, and that she believed I had known all along that his aunt was coming--for Anne to talk like that was sheer idiocy. Yes, there was an aunt. The Japanese butler started the trouble, and Aunt Selina carried it along.
Chapter II.
THE WAY IT BEGAN
It makes me angry every time I think how I tried to make 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.