The Breaking Point - Page 70/275

Just how Leslie Ward had drifted into his innocuous affair with the star

of "The Valley" he was not certain himself. Innocuous it certainly was.

Afterwards, looking back, he was to wonder sometimes if it had not been

precisely for the purpose it served. But that was long months after.

Not until the pattern was completed and he was able to recognize his own

work in it.

The truth was that he was not too happy at home. Nina's smart little

house on the Ridgely Road had at first kept her busy. She had spent

unlimited time with decorators, had studied and rejected innumerable

water-color sketches of interiors, had haunted auction rooms and bid

recklessly on things she felt at the moment she could not do without,

later on to have to wheedle Leslie into straightening her bank balance.

Thought, too, and considerable energy had gone into training and

outfitting her servants, and still more into inducing them to wear the

expensive uniforms and livery she provided.

But what she made, so successfully, was a house rather than a home.

There were times, indeed, when Leslie began to feel that it was not even

a house, but a small hotel. They almost never dined alone, and when they

did Nina would explain that everybody was tied up. Then, after dinner,

restlessness would seize her, and she would want to run in to the

theater, or to make a call. If he refused, she nursed a grievance all

evening.

And he did not like her friends. Things came to a point where, when

he knew one of the gay evenings was on, he would stay in town, playing

billiards at his club, or occasionally wandering into a theater, where

he stood or sat at the back of the house and watched the play with

cynical, discontented eyes.

The casual meeting with Gregory and the introduction to his sister

brought a new interest. Perhaps the very novelty was what first

attracted him, the oddity of feeling that he was on terms of friendship,

for it amounted to that with surprising quickness, with a famous

woman, whose face smiled out at him from his morning paper or, huge and

shockingly colored, from the sheets on the bill boards.

He formed the habit of calling on her in the afternoons at her hotel,

and he saw that she liked it. It was often lonely, she explained. He

sent her flowers and cigarettes, and he found her poised and restful,

and sometimes, when she was off guard, with the lines of old suffering

in her face.

She sat still. She didn't fidget, as Nina did. She listened, too.

She was not as beautiful as she appeared on the stage, but she was

attractive, and he stilled his conscience with the knowledge that she

placed no undue emphasis on his visits. In her world men came and went,

brought or sent small tribute, and she was pleased and grateful. No

more. The next week, or the week after, and other men in other places

would be doing the same things.