The transmitter slipped from his grasp and bounced from the table to the floor. In a minute he was on his knees, groping for it wildly.
“Hello!” he cried. “Hello—hello! Say, get Chicago back! I wasn’t through!”
The two young men were on their feet. He hung up the receiver and turned to them, his voice husky with emotion.
“I’ve been an idiot,” he said brokenly. “Quit work at sixty! Why—I must have been an idiot! I’m a young man still—I’ve got twenty good years in front of me! I’d like to see anybody send me home to die!”
The phone rang again and he took up the receiver with fire blazing in his eyes.
“Is this Jones? No, I want Mr. Jones; Rip Jones. He’s—he’s my partner.” There was a pause. “No, Chicago, that must be another party. I don’t know any Mrs. Jones—I want Mr.——”
He broke off and the expression on his face changed slowly. When he spoke again his husky voice had grown suddenly quiet.
“Why—why, Lola——”
— ◆ —
The Unspeakable Egg.
The Saturday Evening Post (12 July 1924)
When Fifi visited her Long Island aunts the first time she was only ten years old, but after she went back to New York the man who worked around the place said that the sand dunes would never be the same again. She had spoiled them. When she left, everything on Montauk Point seemed sad and futile and broken and old. Even the gulls wheeled about less enthusiastically, as if they missed the brown, hardy little girl with big eyes who played barefoot in the sand.
The years bleached out Fifi’s tan and turned her a pale pink color, but she still managed to spoil many places and plans for many hopeful men. So when at last it was announced in the best newspapers that she had concentrated on a gentleman named Van Tyne everyone was rather glad that all the sadness and longing that followed in her wake should become the responsibility of one self-sacrificing individual; not better for the individual, but for Fifi’s little world very much better indeed.
The engagement was not announced on the sporting page, or even in the help-wanted column, because Fifi’s family belonged to the Society for the Preservation of Large Fortunes; and Mr. Van Tyne was descended from the man who accidentally founded that society, back before the Civil War. It appeared on the page of great names and was illustrated by a picture of a cross-eyed young lady holding the hand of a savage gentleman with four rows of teeth. That was how their pictures came out, anyhow, and the public was pleased to know that they were ugly monsters for all their money, and everyone was satisfied all around. The society editor set up a column telling how Mrs. Van Tyne started off in the Aquitania wearing a blue traveling dress of starched felt with a round square hat to match; and so far as human events can be prophesied, Fifi was as good as married; or, as not a few young men considered, as bad as married.
“An exceptionally brilliant match,” remarked Aunt Cal on the eve of the wedding, as she sat in her house on Montauk Point and clipped the notice for the cousins in Scotland, and then she added abstractedly, “All is forgiven.”
“Why, Cal!” cried Aunt Josephine. “What do you mean when you say all is forgiven? Fifi has never injured you in any way.”
“In the past nine years she has not seen fit to visit us here at Montauk Point, though we have invited her over and over again.”
“But I don’t blame her,” said Aunt Josephine, who was only thirty-one herself. “What would a young pretty girl do down here with all this sand?”
“We like the sand, Jo.”
“But we’re old maids, Cal, with no vices except cigarettes and double-dummy mah-jongg. Now Fifi, being young, naturally likes exciting, vicious things—late hours, dice playing, all the diversions we read about in these books.”
She waved her hand vaguely.
“I don’t blame her for not coming down here. If I were in her place——”
What unnatural ambitions lurked in Aunt Jo’s head were never disclosed, for the sentence remained unfinished. The front door of the house opened in an abrupt, startled way, and a young lady walked into the room in a dress marked “Paris, France.”
“Good-evening, dear ladies,” she cried, smiling radiantly from one to the other. “I’ve come down here for an indefinite time in order to play in the sand.”
“Fifi!”
“Fifi!”
“Aunts!”
“But, my dear child,” cried Aunt Jo, “I thought this was the night of the bridal dinner.”
“It is,” admitted Fifi cheerfully. “But I didn’t go. I’m not going to the wedding either. I sent in my regrets today.”
It was all very vague; but it seemed, as far as her aunts could gather, that young Van Tyne was too perfect—whatever that meant. After much urging Fifi finally explained that he reminded her of an advertisement for a new car.
“A new car?” inquired Aunt Cal, wide eyed. “What new car?”
“Any new car.”
“Do you mean——”
Aunt Cal blushed.
“I don’t understand this new slang, but isn’t there some part of a car that’s called the—the clutch?”
“Oh, I like him physically,” remarked Fifi coolly. Her aunts started in unison. “But he was just—— Oh, too perfect, too new; as if they’d fooled over him at the factory for a long time and put special curtains on him——”
Aunt Jo had visions of a black-leather sheik.
“——and balloon tires and a permanent shave. He was too civilized for me, Aunt Cal.” She sighed. “I must be one of the rougher girls, after all.”
She was as immaculate and dainty sitting there as though she were the portrait of a young lady and about to be hung on the wall. But underneath her cheerfulness her aunts saw that she was in a state of hysterical excitement, and they persisted in suspecting that something more definite and shameful was the matter.
“But it isn’t,” insisted Fifi. “Our engagement was announced three months ago, and not a single chorus girl has sued George for breach of promise. Not one! He doesn’t use alcohol in any form except as hair tonic. Why, we’ve never even quarreled until today!”
“You’ve made a serious mistake,” said Aunt Cal.
Fifi nodded.
“I’m afraid I’ve broken the heart of the nicest man I ever met in my life, but it can’t be helped. Immaculate! Why, what’s the use of being immaculate when, no matter how hard you try, you can’t be half so immaculate as your husband? And tactful? George could introduce Mr. Trotzky to Mr. Rockefeller and there wouldn’t be a single blow. But after a certain point, I want to have all the tact in my family, and I told him so. I’ve never left a man practically at the church door before, so I’m going to stay here until everyone has had a chance to forget.”
And stay she did—rather to the surprise of her aunts, who expected that next morning she would rush wildly and remorsefully back to New York. She appeared at breakfast very calm and fresh and cool, and as though she had slept soundly all night, and spent the day reclining under a red parasol beside the sunny dunes, watching