Moving back to the dressing-table she caught her reflection in the tall triple glass. Again those fine wrinkles about lids and lips, those vertical lines between the eyes! She would not permit it; no, not for a moment. She commanded herself: “Now, Pauline, STOP WORRYING. You know perfectly well there’s no such thing as worry; it’s only dyspepsia or want of exercise, and everything’s really all right — ” in the insincere tone of a mother soothing a bruised baby.
She looked again, and fancied the wrinkles were really fainter, the vertical lines less deep. Once more she saw before her an erect athletic woman, with all her hair and all her teeth, and just a hint of rouge (because “people did it”) brightening a still fresh complexion; saw her small symmetrical features, the black brows drawn with a light stroke over handsome directly-gazing gray eyes, the abundant whitening hair which still responded so crisply to the waver’s wand, the firmly planted feet with arched insteps rising to slim ankles.
How absurd, how unlike herself, to be upset by that foolish news! She would look in on Dexter and settle the Mahatma business in five minutes. If there was to be a scandal she wasn’t going to have Dexter mixed up in it — above all not against the Mahatma. She could never forget that it was the Mahatma who had first told her she was psychic.
The maid opened an inner door an inch or two to say rebukingly: “Madam, the hair-dresser; and Miss Bruss asked me to remind you — ”
“Yes, yes, yes,” Mrs. Manford responded hastily; repeating below her breath, as she flung herself into her kimono and settled down before her toilet-table: “Now, I forbid you to let yourself feel hurried! You KNOW there’s no such thing as hurry.”
But her eye again turned anxiously to the little clock among her scent-bottles, and she wondered if she might not save time by dictating to Maisie Bruss while she was being waved and manicured. She envied women who had no sense of responsibility — like Jim’s little Lita. As for herself, the only world she knew rested on her shoulders.
III
At a quarter past one, when Nona arrived at her half-brother’s house, she was told that Mrs. Wyant was not yet down.
“And Mr. Wyant not yet up, I suppose? From his office, I mean,” she added, as the young butler looked his surprise.
Pauline Manford had been very generous at the time of her son’s marriage. She was relieved at his settling down, and at his seeming to understand that marriage connoted the choice of a profession, and the adoption of what people called regular habits. Not that Jim’s irregularities had ever been such as the phrase habitually suggests. They had chiefly consisted in his not being able to make up his mind what to do with his life (so like his poor father, that!), in his always forgetting what time it was, or what engagements his mother had made for him, in his wanting a chemical laboratory fitted up for him at Cedarledge, and then, when it was all done, using it first as a kennel for breeding fox-terriers and then as a quiet place to practise the violin.
Nona knew how sorely these vacillations had tried her mother, and how reassured Mrs. Manford had been when the young man, in the heat of his infatuation for Lita, had vowed that if she would have him he would turn to and grind in an office like all the other husbands.
LITA HAVE HIM! Lita Cliffe, a portionless orphan, with no one to guide her in the world but a harum-scarum and somewhat blown-upon aunt, the “impossible” Mrs. Percy Landish! Mrs. Manford smiled at her son’s modesty while she applauded his good resolutions. “This experience has made a man of dear Jim,” she said, mildly triumphing in the latest confirmation of her optimism. “If only it lasts —!” she added, relapsing into human uncertainty.
“Oh, it will, mother; you’ll see; as long as Lita doesn’t get tired of him,” Nona had assured her.
“As long —? But, my dear child, why should Lita ever get tired of him? You seem to forget what a miracle it was that a girl like Lita, with no one but poor Kitty Landish to look after her, should ever have got such a husband!”
Nona held her ground. “Well — just look about you, mother! Don’t they almost all get tired of each other? And when they do, will anything ever stop their having another try? Think of your big dinners! Doesn’t Maisie always have to make out a list of previous marriages as long as a cross-word puzzle, to prevent your calling people by the wrong names?”
Mrs. Manford waved away the challenge. “Jim and Lita are not like that; and I don’t like your way of speaking of divorce, Nona,” she had added, rather weakly for her — since, as Nona might have reminded her, her own way of speaking of divorce varied disconcertingly with the time, the place and the divorce.
The young girl had leisure to recall this discussion while she sat and waited for her brother and his wife. In the freshly decorated and studiously empty house there seemed to be no one to welcome her. The baby (whom she had first enquired for) was asleep, his mother hardly awake, and the head of the house still “at the office.” Nona looked about the drawing-room and wondered — the habit was growing on her.
The drawing-room (it suddenly occurred to her) was very expressive of the modern marriage state. It looked, for all its studied effects, its rather nervous attention to “values,” complementary colours, and the things the modern decorator lies awake over, more like the waiting-room of a glorified railway station than the setting of an established way of life. Nothing in it seemed at home or at ease — from the early kakemono of a bearded sage, on walls of pale buff silk, to the three mourning irises isolated in a white Sung vase in the desert of an otherwise empty table. The only life in the room was contributed by the agitations of the exotic goldfish in a huge spherical aquarium; and they too were but transients, since Lita insisted on having the aquarium illuminated night and day with electric bulbs, and the sleepless fish were always dying off and having to be replaced.
Mrs. Manford had paid for the house and its decoration. It was not what she would have wished for herself — she had not yet quite caught up with the new bareness and selectiveness. But neither would she have wished the young couple to live in the opulent setting of tapestries and “period” furniture which she herself preferred. Above all she wanted them to keep up; to do what the other young couples were doing; she had even digested — in one huge terrified gulp — Lita’s black boudoir, with its welter of ebony velvet cushions overlooked by a statue as to which Mrs. Manford could only minimize the indecency by saying that she understood it was Cubist. But she did think it unkind — after all she had done — to have Nona suggest that Lita might get tired of Jim!
The idea had never really troubled Nona — at least not till lately. Even now she had nothing definite in her mind. Nothing beyond the vague question: what would a woman like Lita be likely to do if she suddenly grew tired of the life she was leading? But that question kept coming back so often that she had really wanted, that morning, to consult her mother about it; for who else was there to consult? Arthur Wyant? Why, poor Arthur had never been able to manage his own poor little concerns with any sort of common sense or consistency; and at the suggestion that any one might tire of Jim he would be as indignant as Mrs. Manford, and without her power of controlling her emotions.
Dexter Manford? Well — Dexter Manford’s daughter had to admit that it really wasn’t his business if his step-son’s marriage threatened to be a failure; and besides, Nona knew how overwhelmed with work her father always was, and hesitated to lay this extra burden on him. For it would be a burden. Manford was very fond of Jim (as indeed they all were), and had been extremely kind to him. It was entirely owing to Manford’s influence that Jim, who was regarded as vague and unreliable, had got such a good berth in the Amalgamated Trust Co.; and Manford had been