The gay and fashionable crowd of which Audrey had been the center played
madly that winter. The short six weeks of the season were already close
to an end. By mid-January the south and California would have claimed
most of the women and some of the men. There were a few, of course,
who saw the inevitable catastrophe: the Mackenzies had laid up their
house-boat on the west coast of Florida. Denis Nolan had let his little
place at Pinehurst. The advance wave of the war tide, the increased cost
of living, had sobered and made thoughtful the middle class, but above
in the great businesses, and below among the laboring people, money was
plentiful and extravagance ran riot.
And Audrey Valentine's world missed her. It refused to accept her
poverty as an excuse, and clamored for her. It wanted her to sit
again at a piano, somewhere, anywhere, with a lighted cigaret on the
music-rack, and sing her husky, naive little songs. It wanted her cool
audacity. It wanted her for week-end parties and bridge, and to canter
on frosty mornings on its best horses and make slaves of the park
policemen, so that she might jump forbidden fences. It wanted to see
her oust its grinning chauffeurs, and drive its best cars at their best
speed.
Audrey Valentine leading a cloistered life! Impossible! Selfish!
And Audrey was not cut out for solitude. She did not mind poverty. She
found it rather a relief to acknowledge what had always been the fact.
But she did mind loneliness. And her idea of making herself over into
something useful was not working out particularly well. She spent two
hours a day, at a down-town school, struggling with shorthand, and her
writing-table was always littered with papers covered with queer hooks
and curves, or with typed sheets beginning: "Messrs Smith and Co.,: Dear Sirs."
Clayton Spencer met her late in December, walking feverishly along with
a book under her arm, and a half-desperate look in her eyes. He felt a
little thrill when he saw her, which should have warned him but did not.
She did not even greet him. She stopped and held out her book to him.
"Take it!" she said. "I've thrown it away twice, and two wretched men
have run after me and brought it back."
He took it and glanced at it.
"Spelling! Can't you spell?"
"Certainly I can spell," she said with dignity. "I'm a very good
speller. Clay, there isn't an 'i' in business, is there?"
"It is generally considered necessary to have two pretty good eyes in
business." But he saw then that she was really rather despairing. "There
is, one 'i,'" he said. "It seems foolish, doesn't it? Audrey dear, what
are you trying to do? For heaven's sake, if it's money?"