A new scent — unrecognizable but exquisite. In its wake came Lita Wyant, half-dancing, half-drifting, fastening a necklace, humming a tune, her little round head, with the goldfish-coloured hair, the mother-of-pearl complexion and screwed-up auburn eyes, turning sideways like a bird’s on her long throat. She was astonished but delighted to see Nona, indifferent to her husband’s non-arrival, and utterly unaware that lunch had been waiting for half an hour.
“I had a sandwich and a cocktail after my exercises. I don’t suppose it’s time for me to be hungry again,” she conjectured. “But perhaps you are, you poor child. Have you been waiting long?”
“Not much! I know you too well to be punctual,” Nona laughed.
Lita widened her eyes. “Are you suggesting that I’m not? Well, then, how about your ideal brother?”
“He’s down town working to keep a roof over your head and your son’s.”
Lita shrugged. “Oh, a roof — I don’t care much for roofs, do you — or is it ROOVES? Not this one, at any rate.” She caught Nona by the shoulders, held her at arm’s-length, and with tilted head and persuasively narrowed eyes, demanded: “This room is AWFUL, isn’t it? Now acknowledge that it is! And Jim won’t give me the money to do it over.”
“Do it over? But, Lita, you did it exactly as you pleased two years ago!”
“Two years ago? Do you mean to say you like anything that you liked two years ago?”
“Yes — you!” Nona retorted: adding rather helplessly: “And, besides, everybody admires the room so much — .” She stopped, feeling that she was talking exactly like her mother.
Lita’s little hands dropped in a gesture of despair. “That’s just it! EVERYBODY admires it. Even Mrs. Manford does. And when you think what sort of things EVERYBODY admires! What’s the use of pretending, Nona? It’s the typical cliché drawing-room. Every one of the couples who were married the year we were has one like it. The first time Tommy Ardwin saw it — you know he’s the new decorator — he said: ‘Gracious, how familiar all this seems!’ and began to whistle ‘Home, Sweet Home’!”
“But of course he would, you simpleton! When what he wants is to be asked to do it over!”
Lita heaved a sigh. “If he only could! Perhaps he might reconcile me to this house. But I don’t believe anybody could do that.” She glanced about her with an air of ineffable disgust. “I’d like to throw everything in it into the street. I’ve been so bored here.”
Nona laughed. “You’d be bored anywhere. I wish another Tommy Ardwin would come along and tell you what an old cliché being bored is.”
“An old cliché? Why shouldn’t it be? When life itself is such a bore? You can’t redecorate life!”
“If you could, what would you begin by throwing into the street? The baby?”
Lita’s eyes woke to fire. “Don’t be an idiot! You know I adore my baby.”
“Well — then Jim?”
“You know I adore my Jim!” echoed the young wife, mimicking her own emotion.
“Hullo — that sounds ominous!” Jim Wyant came in, clearing the air with his fresh good-humoured presence. “I fear my bride when she says she adores me,” he said, taking Nona into a brotherly embrace.
As he stood there, sturdy and tawny, a trifle undersized, with his bright blue eyes and short blunt-nosed face, in which everything was so handsomely modelled and yet so safe and sober, Nona fell again to her dangerous wondering. Something had gone out of his face — all the wild uncertain things, the violin, model-making, inventing, dreaming, vacillating — everything she had best loved except the twinkle in his sobered eyes. Whatever else was left now was all plain utility. Well, better so, no doubt — when one looked at Lita! Her glance caught her sister-in-law’s face in a mirror between two panels, and the reflection of her own beside it; she winced a little at the contrast. At her best she had none of that milky translucence, or of the long lines which made Lita seem in perpetual motion, as a tremor of air lives in certain trees. Though Nona was as tall and nearly as slim, she seemed to herself to be built, while Lita was spun of spray and sunlight. Perhaps it was Nona’s general brownness — she had Dexter Manford’s brown crinkled hair, his strong black lashes setting her rather usual~looking gray eyes; and the texture of her dusky healthy skin, compared to Lita’s, seemed rough and opaque. The comparison added to her general vague sense of discouragement. “It’s not one of my beauty days,” she thought.
Jim was drawing her arm through his. “Come along, my girl. Is there going to be any lunch?” he queried, turning toward the dining~room.
“Oh, probably. In this house the same things always happen every day,” Lita averred with a slight grimace.
“Well, I’m glad lunch does — on the days when I can make a dash up~town for it.”
“On others Lita eats goldfish food,” Nona laughed.
“Luncheon is served, madam,” the butler announced.
The meal, as usual under Lita’s roof, was one in which delicacies alternated with delays. Mrs. Manford would have been driven out of her mind by the uncertainties of the service and the incoherence of the menu; but she would have admitted that no one did a pilaff better than Lita’s cook. Gastronomic refinements were wasted on Jim, whose indifference to the possession of the Wyant madeira was one of his father’s severest trials. (“I shouldn’t have been surprised if YOU hadn’t cared, Nona; after all, you’re a Manford; but that a Wyant shouldn’t have a respect for old wine!” Arthur Wyant often lamented to her.) As for Lita, she either nibbled languidly at new health foods, or made ravenous inroads into the most indigestible dish presented to her. To-day she leaned back, dumb and indifferent, while Jim devoured what was put before him as if unaware that it was anything but canned beef; and Nona watched the two under guarded lids.
The telephone tinkled, and the butler announced: “Mr. Manford, madam.”
Nona Manford looked up. “For me?”
“No, miss; Mrs. Wyant.”
Lita was on her feet, suddenly animated. “Oh, all right . . . Don’t wait for me,” she flung over her shoulder as she made for the door.
“Have the receiver brought in here,” Jim suggested; but she brushed by without heeding.
“That’s something new — Lita sprinting for the telephone!” Jim laughed.
“And to talk to father!” For the life of her, Nona could not have told why she stopped short with a vague sense of embarrassment. Dexter Manford had always been very kind to his stepson’s wife; but then everybody was kind to Lita.
Jim’s head was bent over the pilaff; he took it down in quick undiscerning mouthfuls.
“Well, I hope he’s saying something that will amuse her: nothing seems to, nowadays.”
It was on the tip of Nona’s tongue to rejoin: “Oh, yes; it amuses her to say that nothing amuses her.” But she looked at her brother’s face, faintly troubled under its surface serenity, and refrained.
Instead, she remarked on the beauty of the two yellow arums in a bronze jar reflected in the mahogany of the dining-table. “Lita has a genius for flowers.”
“And for everything else — when she chooses!”
The door opened and Lita sauntered back and dropped into her seat. She shook her head disdainfully at the proffered pilaff. There was a pause.
“Well — what’s the news?” Jim asked.
His wife arched her exquisite brows. “News? I expect you to provide that. I’m only just awake.”
“I mean — ” But he broke off, and signed to the butler to remove his plate. There was another pause; then Lita’s little