The Beautiful and Damned Part 33

"I just laughed and told him to think of me rather as a loving-cup that goes from hand to hand but should be valued none the less."

"Somehow it doesn't bother me--on the other hand it would, of course, if you'd done any more than kiss them. But I believe _you're_ absolutely incapable of jealousy except as hurt vanity. Why don't you care what I've done? Wouldn't you prefer it if I'd been absolutely innocent?"

"It's all in the impression it might have made on you. _My_ kisses were because the man was good-looking, or because there was a slick moon, or even because I've felt vaguely sentimental and a little stirred. But that's all--it's had utterly no effect on me. But you'd remember and let memories haunt you and worry you."

"Haven't you ever kissed any one like you've kissed me?"

"No," she answered simply. "As I've told you, men have tried--oh, lots of things. Any pretty girl has that experience.... You see," she resumed, "it doesn't matter to me how many women you've stayed with in the past, so long as it was merely a physical satisfaction, but I don't believe I could endure the idea of your ever having lived with another woman for a protracted period or even having wanted to marry some possible girl. It's different somehow. There'd be all the little intimacies remembered--and they'd dull that freshness that after all is the most precious part of love."

Rapturously he pulled her down beside him on the pillow.

"Oh, my darling," he whispered, "as if I remembered anything but your dear kisses."

Then Gloria, in a very mild voice:

"Anthony, did I hear anybody say they were thirsty?"

Anthony laughed abruptly and with a sheepish and amused grin got out of bed.

"With just a _little_ piece of ice in the water," she added. "Do you suppose I could have that?"

Gloria used the adjective "little" whenever she asked a favor--it made the favor sound less arduous. But Anthony laughed again--whether she wanted a cake of ice or a marble of it, he must go down-stairs to the kitchen.... Her voice followed him through the hall: "And just a _little_ cracker with just a _little_ marmalade on it...."

"Oh, gos.h.!.+" sighed Anthony in rapturous slang, "she's wonderful, that girl! She _has_ it!"

"When we have a baby," she began one day--this, it had already been decided, was to be after three years--"I want it to look like you."

"Except its legs," he insinuated slyly.

"Oh, yes, except his legs. He's got to have my legs. But the rest of him can be you."

"My nose?"

Gloria hesitated.

"Well, perhaps my nose. But certainly your eyes--and my mouth, and I guess my shape of the face. I wonder; I think he'd be sort of cute if he had my hair."

"My dear Gloria, you've appropriated the whole baby."

"Well, I didn't mean to," she apologized cheerfully.

"Let him have my neck at least," he urged, regarding himself gravely in the gla.s.s. "You've often said you liked my neck because the Adam's apple doesn't show, and, besides, your neck's too short."

"Why, it is _not_!" she cried indignantly, turning to the mirror, "it's just right. I don't believe I've ever seen a better neck."

"It's too short," he repeated teasingly.

"Short?" Her tone expressed exasperated wonder.

"Short? You're crazy!" She elongated and contracted it to convince herself of its reptilian sinuousness. "Do you call _that_ a short neck?"

"One of the shortest I've ever seen."

For the first time in weeks tears started from Gloria's eyes and the look she gave him had a quality of real pain.

"Oh, Anthony--"

"My Lord, Gloria!" He approached her in bewilderment and took her elbows in his hands. "Don't cry, _please_! Didn't you know I was only kidding?

Gloria, look at me! Why, dearest, you've got the longest neck I've ever seen. Honestly."

Her tears dissolved in a twisted smile.

"Well--you shouldn't have said that, then. Let's talk about the b-baby."

Anthony paced the floor and spoke as though rehearsing for a debate.

"To put it briefly, there are two babies we could have, two distinct and logical babies, utterly differentiated. There's the baby that's the combination of the best of both of us. Your body, my eyes, my mind, your intelligence--and then there is the baby which is our worst--my body, your disposition, and my irresolution."

"I like that second baby," she said.

"What I'd really like," continued Anthony, "would be to have two sets of triplets one year apart and then experiment with the six boys--"

"Poor me," she interjected.

"--I'd educate them each in a different country and by a different system and when they were twenty-three I'd call them together and see what they were like."

"Let's have 'em all with my neck," suggested Gloria.

THE END OF A CHAPTER

The car was at length repaired and with a deliberate vengeance took up where it left off the business of causing infinite dissension. Who should drive? How fast should Gloria go? These two questions and the eternal recriminations involved ran through the days. They motored to the Post-Road towns, Rye, Portchester, and Greenwich, and called on a dozen friends, mostly Gloria's, who all seemed to be in different stages of having babies and in this respect as well as in others bored her to a point of nervous distraction. For an hour after each visit she would bite her fingers furiously and be inclined to take out her rancor on Anthony.

"I loathe women," she cried in a mild temper. "What on earth can you say to them--except talk 'lady-lady'? I've enthused over a dozen babies that I've wanted only to choke. And every one of those girls is either incipiently jealous and suspicious of her husband if he's charming or beginning to be bored with him if he isn't."

"Don't you ever intend to see any women?"

"I don't know. They never seem clean to me--never--never. Except just a few. Constance Shaw--you know, the Mrs. Merriam who came over to see us last Tuesday--is almost the only one. She's so tall and fresh-looking and stately."

"I don't like them so tall."

Though they went to several dinner dances at various country clubs, they decided that the autumn was too nearly over for them to "go out" on any scale, even had they been so inclined. He hated golf; Gloria liked it only mildly, and though she enjoyed a violent rush that some undergraduates gave her one night and was glad that Anthony should be proud of her beauty, she also perceived that their hostess for the evening, a Mrs. Granby, was somewhat disquieted by the fact that Anthony's cla.s.smate, Alec Granby, joined with enthusiasm in the rush.

The Granbys never phoned again, and though Gloria laughed, it piqued her not a little.

"You see," she explained to Anthony, "if I wasn't married it wouldn't worry her--but she's been to the movies in her day and she thinks I may be a vampire. But the point is that placating such people requires an effort that I'm simply unwilling to make.... And those cute little freshmen making eyes at me and paying me idiotic compliments! I've grown up, Anthony."

Marietta itself offered little social life. Half a dozen farm-estates formed a hectagon around it, but these belonged to ancient men who displayed themselves only as inert, gray-thatched lumps in the back of limousines on their way to the station, whither they were sometimes accompanied by equally ancient and doubly ma.s.sive wives. The townspeople were a particularly uninteresting type--unmarried females were predominant for the most part--with school-festival horizons and souls bleak as the forbidding white architecture of the three churches. The only native with whom they came into close contact was the broad-hipped, broad-shouldered Swedish girl who came every day to do their work. She was silent and efficient, and Gloria, after finding her weeping violently into her bowed arms upon the kitchen table, developed an uncanny fear of her and stopped complaining about the food. Because of her untold and esoteric grief the girl stayed on.