To-night, when he presently fell asleep, somewhat more comfortable
in body, and soothed in spirit by the promise of a visit from the
doctor, Rachael went into her own room and sinking into a deep
chair sat staring stupidly at the floor. She did not think of the
husband she had just left, nor of the formal dinner party being
given, only half a mile away, to a great English novelist--a
dinner to which the Breckenridges had of course been asked and
upon which Rachael had weeks ago set her heart. She was tired, and
her thoughts floated lazily about nothing at all, or into some
opaque region of their own knowing, where the ills of the body
might not follow.
Presently Miss Vanderwall, clothed in a trailing robe of soft
Arabian cotton, came briskly out of the bathroom, her short dark
hair hanging in a mane about her rosy face.
"Why so pensive, Rachael?" she asked cheerfully, pressing a button
that lighted the circle of globes about the dressing-table mirror,
and seating herself before it. But under her loose locks she sent
a keen and concerned look at her hostess' thoughtful face.
"Tired," Rachael answered briefly, not changing her attitude, but
with a fleeting shadow of a smile.
"How's Clancy?"
"Asleep. He's wretched, poor fellow! Berry Stokes' bachelor
dinner, you know. That crowd is bad for him."
"I KNEW it must have been an orgy!" Miss Vanderwall declared
vivaciously. "That was a silly slip of mine in the car. Billy
doesn't know he went, I suppose?"
"No, he promised her he wouldn't. But everyone was at the dinner.
Some of them came home early, I believe. But it was all kept
quiet, because Aline Pearsall is such a little shrinking violet, I
suppose," Mrs. Breckenridge said. "The Pearsalls are to think it
was just an impromptu affair. Billy and Aline of course have no
idea what a party it was. But Clarence says that poor Berry was
worse than he, and a few of them are still keeping it up. It's a
shame, of course--"
Her uninterested voice dropped into silence.
"Men are queer," Miss Vanderwall said profoundly, busy with ivory-
backed brushes, powders, and pastes.
"The mystery to me--about men," mused Mrs. Breckenridge, her
absent eyes upon the buckled slipper she held in her hand, "is not
that they are as helpless as babies the moment anything goes wrong
with their poor little heads or their poor little tummies, but
that they work so hard, in spite of that, to increase the general
discomfort of living. Women have a great deal of misery to bear,
they are brave or cowardly about it as the case may be, but at
least they endure and renounce and diet and keep early hours--or
whatever's to be done--they TRY to lessen the sum of physical
misery. But men go cheerily on--they smoke too much, and eat too
much, and drink too much, and they bring the resulting misery
sweetly and confidently to some woman to bear for them. It's
hopeless!"