I

The Name Was Spelled P-h-r-y-c-e When They Wove the Bayeux Tapestry

Walter Price was talking about himself again, discoursing in detail on the distinguished and ancient history of the Price family. Tom Harrow had often heard Walter indulge himself before in egocentric reminiscence. Breakfast was almost over, and Tom Harrow was listening without being bored. In fact, he was not sure, because of his age and the erosion of time, whether or not he had ever before heard Walter on the subject of his very early forebears. This was not strange, because he had heard Walter on a great number of others, and for many years had only half listened. Given an adequate space of time, one could discount a number of things about Walter, but Tom Harrow still could not discount him personally. He knew that Walter had ability and he invariably respected Walter’s powers of imagination. It was a pleasure to sit over a late breakfast and listen to Walter talk, because it was no longer necessary to give Walter full attention. He could think, as Walter’s discourse progressed, that Walter must have overindulged in his old bad morning habit of sitting in a bathtub filled with cold water and drinking a jigger of straight gin.

Tom Harrow could recall distinctly the first time he had ever known Walter to indulge in this practice. This had been when Tom was living in an apartment on Lexington Avenue. It was summer and his wife, Rhoda, had gone to Watch Hill with their son, Hal; but it had been necessary for Tom to stay in town in order to pick the cast for a play, the name of which he could not recollect at the moment. It was a great many years ago, although even then his friendship with Walter Price had already burgeoned, but the whole scene was accurately dated because the gin which Walter had been drinking was still known as “bathtub gin.” Walter had occupied Hal’s tub, and Walter had not fitted into it accurately.

“Tom,” he had heard Walter calling—and whenever Walter wanted anything his voice had the appeal of melodramatic urgency—“will you please come here quickly?”

He could remember the first thought that had run through his mind. Walter in those days frequently told of a crisis which he had faced while staying at the Hotel Biltmore in New York when he was working in an advisory capacity with the author of the play known as Getting Gertie’s Garter. Walter had been very sure that the play was Getting Gertie’s Garter, although it could have been Up in Mabel’s Room, and Tom Harrow had already observed back in the bathtub gin days that Walter was becoming less and less accurate about plays and facts. Indeed, as of the present, Walter was beginning to move his early play-doctoring days to London, where he had helped Mr. Shaw with Major Barbara—a difficult move, since Walter’s life span did not fit well with Major Barbara.

Back at the Biltmore, Walter had felt exhausted after hours of what he chose to call “close intellectual collision,” and he had retired to the room supplied for him by the producer of Up in Mabel’s Room or Getting Gertie’s Garter, or whatever the confection might have been on which he had been working. The title did not really matter. The point was that Walter had plunged himself into a hot tub for purposes of relaxation, and there were fine large bathtubs in the Biltmore then, as perhaps there were still, but Walter only recollected the Biltmore as it had existed in the days contemporaneous with F. Scott Fitzgerald, whom Walter always oddly referred to as Fitzy.

Plunging into a hot bath for purposes of relaxation was a practice, he often explained, that had been taught him by his old colored mammy on the family plantation near Columbia, South Carolina—a lovely place, which General Sherman had spared after Walter’s grandmother, then a mere slip of a girl, had interceded personally with the general. The plantation period had occurred long before Walter had begun moving himself and the whole Price family to their holdings at Halliday Hall in Hampshire, England—not that any of this concerned the bathtub. The point was that Walter in his warm bath had developed a habit of plunging almost beneath the water and then pushing himself upward against the back of the tub. Even in the twenties he had started putting on weight, because suddenly a suction developed between his shoulder blades so severe that any motion he made to extricate himself caused excruciating agony and his cries for assistance went unheeded, but finally nature asserted herself by abhorring the vacuum and thus he was released.

When Walter called on that distant day at Lexington Avenue, Tom hurried to Hal’s bathroom fearing that Walter had been caught again, but it was morning and Walter was in cold water. It was Walter’s old Scottish tutor, a direct descendant of Boswell, who had taught Walter to indulge in the rigors of a cold pre-prandial bath. The pain, as the tutor had said, was worth the buttered scones, or words to that effect.

“Tom,” Walter had said, “would you mind playing the good host and bringing me a bottle of gin to counter the chill? Gin and cold water of a morning give me my best thoughts. It was a trick I learned from my grandfather, Colonel Lamar, who served with Hood’s Brigade before he acquired his large holdings in Nicaragua.” That was certainly long before Walter had moved the Price family to Hampshire, but Walter had never given up a cold morning tub and gin. The practice set the wheels of the mind revolving, not that the wheels had ever needed lubrication, and ever afterwards Tom had seen to it personally that a fifth of gin was always placed in Walter’s bathroom whenever Walter came to stay with him, professionally or socially.

Today at the breakfast table Walter’s discourse on the early history of the Price family was not a bad topic for the late morning. Over the centuries, it seemed, the name Price, originally early Norman, had undergone considerable alteration.

“This fact first occurred to me when I was in the fifth form at Harrow,” Walter Price said. “Those dear Edwardian days! I wish you might have been able, Tom, to share with me the privilege of having attended Harrow.”

Reluctantly Tom pulled his rambling thoughts together. A glance at his Spode coffeecup, at the mahogany of the breakfast table, and at the hot plates on the hunting board reminded him that he also had been occasionally to England.

“Now wait a minute,” he said. “I thought you had gone to the Taliaferro School for Boys outside Columbia, South Carolina. You used to walk there barefoot from the old plantation, didn’t you? The school was run by Colonel Taliaferro, a great Latinist, who had served with your grandfather Lamar under General Hood—or was I thinking of somebody else?”

Walter Price sighed patiently.

“That was considerably earlier, Tom,” he said, “before my Uncle Roderick sent for me in South Africa. Uncle Roderick was one of Rhodes’s protégés, you may remember. He started as Rhodes’s office boy when he was eleven and a half. I’ll have to tell you about Uncle Roderick sometime, Tom. He’s a story himself—a true product of the old unregenerate days when England was Old England. May I have another cup of coffee? It’s a beautiful George the Third coffeepot, Tom.”

“Actually it’s George the Second,” Tom Harrow said.

“Of course it is,” Walter Price answered. “And I remember now. You bought it after Hero’s Return, didn’t you? No wonder you could afford the piece, Tom. But I’m amazed that Rhoda didn’t want it.”

“She would have, if she’d remembered it,” Tom Harrow said. “But she had switched by then to Early American silver. Go and call on her someday and let her show you the Reveres and Hurds I bought her.”

“Dear me,” Walter Price said, “I’ve seen them, Tom. I thought they were Presley’s old family pieces.”

There was no use pursuing the subject. Perhaps everything, even history, ceased being factually accurate after a term of years.

“Let’s get back to your school days at Harrow,” Tom said. “You must have been pretty old for Harrow, judging from what you told me about that Taliaferro School in Columbia.”

“I’ve always admired your memory, Tom,” Walter Price said, “but still you fall down sometimes on small details. What was it I ever told you about Taliaferro School in Columbia?”

“I don’t suppose I’m as accurate as I used to be,” Tom Harrow said, “but it seems to me that you told me once that in your first year in Taliaferro’s School in Columbia, South Carolina, you got a young girl into trouble. I think you said that she had something to do with the Temperance Drink Bottling Company.”

Walter blinked his eyes twice. There was no doubt that he had put on weight. In fact, his features hardly resembled those of the earlier Price that Tom Harrow had known once, but personality still persisted.

“We’re getting off the subject,” Walter said. “When was it I told you about Colonel Taliaferro’s School?”

Although Walter Price had ceased to be useful long ago, if indeed he ever had been, Tom still enjoyed his company because neither seriously expected anything from the other—except that Walter would probably ask for a loan before his visit terminated.

“I’m glad you asked me that one,” Tom Harrow said, “because I can remember the occasion exactly. It was in that apartment that Rhoda and I had on Lexington Avenue. You were sitting in Hal’s bathtub drinking gin when you told about the Temperance Drink girl.”

“I remember, now that you bring up the point,” Walter said. “But please recollect that Southerners are more sexually precocious than Northerners, as a rule. Look what goes on in the West Indies, according to all accounts.”

“Whose accounts?” Tom Harrow asked.

“Anyone’s accounts,” Walter Price said. “Frankly, I don’t recall at the moment ever having got any girl in Columbia into trouble; and if I had, I do not think I would have mentioned it in Harold’s bathtub because I would have remembered that Rhoda would not have liked it.”

“Rhoda was at Watch Hill at the time,” Tom said. “You had no reason to worry about Rhoda.”

“If Rhoda had been less at Watch Hill,” Walter Price said, “and more often in that dear old place of yours on Lexington Avenue, and later on Park, Rhoda might be here this minute, mightn’t she?”

Tom Harrow picked up the George the Second coffeepot. It had been with him on Lexington Avenue, but time was beginning to make it a less and less tangible object. He was only lately beginning to discover that one could reach an age when possessions could assume impermanence and lose intrinsic value as they mingled with associations.

“I don’t think any trip to Watch Hill had much to do with anything,” Tom Harrow said, “But let’s get back to our primary subject.”

“What subject?” Walter Price asked.

“The Price family,” Tom Harrow said. “You were talking about the Price family, weren’t you?”

“Was I being so egocentric?” Walter said.

“You were being informative,” Tom Harrow said, “not egocentric, Walter.”

Their glances met for a moment across the table.

“You grow increasingly dramatically constructive, Tom,” Walter Price said. “I’m sure I don’t know how I ever got on the subject of the Prices, but it is, quite impersonally, interesting. A Price came over from Normandy with William the Conqueror. I am told, although I cannot confirm it momentarily, that he is depicted riding at the rear of the Duke in the Bayeux tapestry.”

“Did he wear a nose guard?” Tom Harrow asked.

“Strange you should mention that,” Walter Price said. “I had almost forgotten nose guards, but I wore one when I played left half at Groton, just before I went to Yale.”

“I thought you went to Harrow after your Uncle Roderick made money in the DeBeers Syndicate,” Tom Harrow said.

Neither of them smiled since each was sufficiently considerate of the other to understand that revealed inaccuracy was not a laughing matter.

“I was popping in and out of several schools,” Walter Price said, “directly before I went to Yale. It’s hard to keep them straight, but I did wear one of those rubber nose guards at Groton. I distinctly remember the taste of it.”

“How could you taste it if it was on your nose?” Tom Harrow asked.

“Part of it was in my mouth,” Walter Price said. “You must be nearly old enough to have worn a nose guard yourself, even if you didn’t go to Groton.”

“Well, let’s skip it,” Tom said, “and tell me about the Price that came over with William the Conqueror.”

Walter sipped his coffee.

“His name was Sieur Monsarratt de Phryce. P-h-r-y-c-e. They spelt it that way in those days. Phryce.”

“Why did they stop spelling it that way?” Tom asked.

“The Phryce branch in England at the time of Charles the First changed it to Price after the beheading,” Walter said, “but my own direct ancestors accompanied the young prince to France. The de Phryce château was only a few kilometers northwest of Versailles. I was entertained there when I was a young lieutenant in World War I. Did I ever tell you about the Château de Phryce?”

“Not that I remember at the moment,” Tom Harrow said. “But then, you’ve had a full life, Walter.”

“I very seldom mention the Château de Phryce to anyone,” Walter said. “It is painful to think about it, but General Pershing stopped there.”

“Oh,” Tom Harrow said, “if it’s painful, don’t feel you have to bring it up.”

“It’s quite all right, Tom,” Walter Price said. “All that is painful was the ending of the chateau. It was completely destroyed with my dear cousins in it by the first shot of the Big Bertha, when the Germans were endeavoring to get the range of Paris. It isn’t sensible, of course, that I should be so moved, after the obliteration of so many monuments; but none were so personal to me in quite the same way, Tom. After all, when one comes to think of it, the course of any life is marked by its series of small ruins, at least in the region of human relationships. But then, one must create ruin in order to develop. One can’t stand still, can one?”

There was no doubt that occasionally Walter could exhibit a flash of wisdom. It was true, what he had said about ruins of human relationships. People grew away from each other, tastes changed, and nothing was ever static.

“A good case in point might be my friendship with the Duke of Windsor,” Walter Price said. “David was Prince of Wales at the time. We saw quite a lot of each other during World War I.”

Walter was off again. It was impossible that Walter should feel that anything he said could be believed—or was it? Tom Harrow could not be sure because Walter was the only psycopathic liar he had ever known over a long period of time. It might be possible that Walter could contrive to believe the figments of his own imagination, since they all started on some small platform of fact—and no one was wholly accurate when he talked about himself. It might even be that the palpable falsehoods of Walter Price contained their own peculiar currencies of truth. They indicated a divine sort of discontent. When you thought of it this way, there was a magnificent element in Walter’s battle against reality, and his prevarications became part of literary tradition.

Walter Price, when you came to think of it, was only doing to himself what the great Dumas had done to the real D’Artagnan in The Three Musketeers, but Walter Price was no Dumas. He was an agent who kept losing clients—a fat man in his sixties, with high blood pressure, traveling down to Ogunquit, Maine, to discuss the possible use of a client’s play by a summer theatre; but he was doing the best he could and there was something heart-warming, almost gallant in the effort. The chances were a thousand to one that he had never met the Duke of Windsor, let alone the younger Prince of Wales, but there was still that thousandth chance. You might start to write off the Château de Phryce, but then there had been a Big Bertha.

In the last analysis there was a good deal to be said for that secondary school platitude about playing the game to the end. If you had been playing the game for a very long while, you became conditioned to it until you finally forgot embellishments and graces, and in the end facts were not so important as they used to be. Character in the end was about the only value left, and by disregarding fact, Walter Price had gained in character; yet he was meticulously reliable when it came to contracts and agreements—but then, he had to be.

Tom Harrow looked across the table to the window over the garden. Everything outside was fresh and delicately green because it was the end of May. The gentle pastel tints of the trees and bushes were a sign of renewal reminding him of a speech which his first producer, Arthur Higgins, had once made when presented with a silver tray by a grateful cast on the three hundredth performance of a play.

“This lovely gift,” Arthur Higgins had said, “will stimulate me to rededicate myself anew.” Although these awful words were not useful in themselves, they evoked anew a picture of Arthur Higgins, now deceased, which went to prove that the distillation of fact was all that mattered.

It was spring. Decoration Day was just around the corner, and it occurred to Tom Harrow that this year he must positively make a visit to the family lot in the Upper Hill Cemetery. He would stand there looking at his parents’ graves and muse on the inescapable fact of mortality, which was one fact that could not distill itself; but he would not resolve to rededicate himself anew. It was too late, because you only dedicated yourself, once in a life time, and there was no such thing as rededication. And the worst of it was that you never really knew that you had genuinely dedicated yourself until long after you had done it.

“There’s more coffee and bacon if you want them, Walter,” Tom Harrow said. “They are up there being kept at a constant temperature, like your friendship and mine. You are sure you don’t want some more?”

“Oh, no thanks, Tom,” Walter said, “and are you sure you don’t mind my staying over tomorrow or the day after?”

“It will be a pleasure, Walter,” Tom answered. “There will only be the family. But I hope you will excuse me for a while right now. I’ve got one or two things to do. I’m still worrying over finishing a third act, and I’ve got to call up Beechley in New York.”

“I know that you and Ed are very close ever since the old Mort Sullivan days,” Walter said, “but it does seem to me, quite frankly, that Ed has been slipping in the last few years.”

It was hard to tell whether or not Walter had heard something. You never knew exactly when you were on solid ground with Walter Price.

“We are all slipping, I suppose,” Tom said, “in our small, individual ways.”

It was pleasant to realize that he was including himself in the slipping group only through courtesy, but the moment would arrive sometime and there could be no concealment.

“Are you sure Emily won’t be bored if I stay?” Walter Price asked.

“You know very well Emily is never bored,” Tom Harrow said. “That’s the main reason why I married Emily.”

“Oh, come now,” Walter said, “there were lots of other reasons.”

The worst of it was that reasons were like the lilacs outside the window—they burgeoned and bloomed triumphantly and then went to seed. Villon had said something along those lines. Villon was a very able poet.

“The capacity for not being bored was one of the main reasons,” Tom said, “and someone, out of compassion, had to take her off the stage. But the point is that Emily is going to love your staying here awhile.”

His glance traveled again around the dining room. The room and the whole house were the result of his having been director and producer as well as a playwright. It was inevitable that the place should have the perfection and the atmosphere of a stage set. Suddenly, because thoughts moved oddly sometimes, he found his mind writing stage directions:

The curtain rises on the Harrow dining room at a quarter before ten o’clock of a late May morning. The pale but glorious sunlight of a New England spring filters through window at L; through its small panes one glimpses dewy lilacs in bud and the fresh foliage of a copper beech. The dining room itself is austere New England of the early nineteenth century, as is accurately indicated by its delicate moldings and the truly beautiful mantelpiece at R. The wallpaper is authentic French pictorial, showing the conventional scene of shipwrecked Ulysses encountering Nausicaa and her maidens. The furniture, Chippendale, purchased in the great days of Christie’s, is worthy of this restrained and beautiful background, markedly the fine screen concealing the pantry door, and the hunting board acquired from an Irish castle. Hot plates for a comfortable breakfast stand on its meticulously waxed surface. Obviously the owner of this dining room has a sharp eye for detail. Seated, at the rising of the curtain, one discovers WALTER PRICE, corpulent, loquacious, in his mid-sixties; and his younger host, THOMAS HARROW, director and playwright, turned fifty—a spare man, carefully dressed, with an air about him showing that he is up from New York and not indigenous to this expensively acquired background. There is a sound of footsteps (the clattering of mules) on a staircase offstage at R. EMILY, third wife of THOMAS HARROW, ash-blond and plumply late-thirtyish, in a gold brocade housecoat, enters at R. Though it is only ten in the morning, she wears a number of exceedingly heavy gold bracelets, a diamond-and-sapphire clip, and three diamond rings. One gains the impression that Emily carries as much as she possibly can on her person in case things may become difficult again.

Tom Harrow had learned never to discount coincidence. He could never remember whether the scenario had flashed through his mind before or after he had heard Emily’s mules on the stairs outside. But there she was, entering at R, with the housecoat and exactly the correct amount of jewelry, smelling of bath salts and Chanel No. 5, and with her hair done in the new way that she had picked up from that place in the Sixties, just off Park Avenue, run by that new little man about whom Rita had told her the last time Rita or someone else had come East from Hollywood.

“Good morning, everybody,” Emily said. “And it is a good morning, isn’t it?”

No one could have written a better entrance line. Tom pushed back his chair, crossed to the right and kissed her lightly.

“Ummm, dearest,” Emily said.

She had made the same humming noise the first time he had ever kissed her, and she still did it, and somehow the sound was never as perfunctory as it should have been.

“Walter and I were both wondering where you were, dear,” Tom said. “We were hoping rather desperately that you would join us at breakfast—but better late than never.”

“Oh, I would have, Tom,” Emily said, “except I do know when to efface myself, don’t I? I knew you and Walter wanted to have one of your good long talks. I can read all Tom’s expressions now, Walter. The thing to notice is that teensy-weensy wrinkle just above Tom’s nose. Whenever it deepens, I’ve done something wrong, and it deepened the last time I interrupted you and Walter, Tom, and why shouldn’t it have? I was being selfish. Tom is possessive about his old friends, Walter, just the way he ought to be.”

“Walter is staying for a few days, dear,” Tom said.

“Oh, splendid,” Emily said. “Then I will have a chance to see Walter, and so will Harold. Is Harold down yet?”

“No, not yet,” Tom answered.

Emily seated herself at the foot of the table. Her brocade housecoat rustled discreetly, and her bracelets, as she put her elbows on the table, made a comfortable, solid sound.

“Stepmothers are always horrid, aren’t they?” she said, and her brown eyes turned appealingly to Walter Price. Her ash-blond hair and her brown eyes were the combination, as Arthur Higgins had often said, that got Emily through the outer office, and they still were so beautiful that they frequently made one forget the beginnings of her double chin.

“I hate to be a prying stepmother, Tom,” she said, “but Harold came in very late last night, and I don’t see what there is for him to do in this poky little town. Not that it isn’t a dear town.”

“She means it’s dear because I lived here once, Walter,” Tom Harrow said, “and Emily’s middle name is Loyalty. Emily Loyalty Harrow. She added it the moment she dropped her maiden name.”

“Why, darling,” Emily said, “you say the sweetest things sometimes, so unexpectedly, and you’ve never said that one to me before. He really hasn’t, Walter. There’s always something new every minute when you’re the handmaiden to a genius.”

“Yes, dear,” Tom said. “Each day you must rededicate yourself anew, and let’s not mind about Harold’s late hours. Besides, it is very patient of him, and gracious, to be here with us.”

“Darling,” Emily said, “I adore having Harold, and you know I always have, ever since he first appeared in my life as a gangling, pouty little boy from Groton.”

“Don’t speak disparagingly of Groton, dear,” Tom Harrow said. “It’s one of Walter’s alma maters.”

“Oh,” Emily said, “I never knew you went to Groton, Walter. You’ve never acted like a Grotonian. And coming from me, that’s a compliment, darling.”

“He went there,” Tom said, “and he wore a nose guard.”

Emily dissolved into soft laughter. Her laugh was still beguiling, and she usually knew when to use it.

“Oh dear,” she said, “I never can tell when Tom is going to be funny. It still creeps up and pounces just the way it did the first time I met him at dear old Arthur Higgins’s apartment. Age cannot wither nor custom stale thy infinite variety.”

“That’s a very apt quotation, Emily,” Walter Price said. “I’ve often applied it to Tom myself, but never out loud.”

“She must have been browsing in the library, although the quotation is not quite correct,” Tom said, “and stumbled over a loose Bartlett. And I have another one for you, dear. If you keep reading Bartlett, ‘Get thee to a nunnery’—also William Shakespeare.”

Emily laughed again.

“Darling,” she said, “isn’t this a nunnery enough—being away in this poky old house for the next three months or so? I don’t mean that I don’t love it, and that I don’t love the creative improvements you’ve made on it. Sometimes I say to myself that it is one of your best stage arrangements. It’s almost like a revival of Berkeley Square.”

He had never been able to get over feeling a sharp surprise when Emily startled him. The experience was still like running into a door in the dark.

“That’s a very valid observation, dear,” he said, “and I know what you mean. But after all, we’re both in the theatre, and if you’ve been in the theatre long enough I suppose you can’t help becoming theatrical. I admit I’m theatrical, and Walter here is, too. Somehow you can’t stop attitudinizing, even when you’re at home.”

“Oh, Tom,” Emily said, “I didn’t intend a single thing I said to be a criticism. I just love the whole house, and I know you do your best work here, and I know how you enjoy the atmosphere, and I’m beginning to enjoy it myself more and more each year—the cemetery and the streets and everything, and the small-town-boy-who-made-good part of it. But you will admit it is such a little puddle for such a big frog, dear, and you are big in any puddle.”

There was no reason why Emily should have liked the house or the town, since she was unfitted for both by training and predilection. He was only irritated because she was obviously trying to solicit the sympathy of Walter Price. He wished that Emily would stop soliciting sympathy, but she always had—and from the most unlikely quarters.

“It isn’t a puddle,” he said; “it’s an environment, my dear.”

He was relieved when the pantry door opened, because Emily, once she started, always found it difficult to drop a subject. It was Alfred, the colored houseman, in his gray alpaca coat—a sign that it was morning. In the evening he wore a fresh white coat, and there was no reason why he should not have looked well on the wages that he and his wife were receiving as a couple. There were times when Emily expressed a suspicion that Ruth was not Alfred’s wife, but if Ruth went where Alfred went, so far away from town, her adaptability overcame possible moral turpitude.

“Mr. Dodd asks if he might see you in the garden, Mr. Harrow,” Alfred said.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People would have been delighted by Alfred’s voice, which had no hint of Dixie in it. Alfred was a highly educated man for whom Tom Harrow felt a personal and professional respect. If you wanted a scene in the White House, with a colored butler like the one who had appeared in a Sherwood war play, or, if you wanted a gentle colored professor in a sequence of quiet social significance, there was no reason to look further. Alfred had a fine, high forehead, deep-set, sensitive eyes, and the delicate hands of an artist. It was incredible that what Emily said she had discovered could be true—that Alfred and Ruth daily used up a fifth of bourbon from the liquor closet and that Alfred made two surreptitious calls to New York each day so that he could play the numbers. On the whole, Tom Harrow condoned both these facts, because Emily never had been able to get on with servants—but Alfred and Ruth were able to understand her.

“Thank you, Alfred,” he said, and he smiled affectionately at Emily and Walter Price. “I’m afraid I’ll have to leave you two alone until lunchtime. There’s the garden and then there are some calls to New York.”

“Tom, dear,” Emily said, “I wish you wouldn’t force yourself into this routine. We’ve hardly settled in and we never seem to have any time to do anything together.”

“I know, dear,” Tom said. “I realize I’m always saying and hoping that I’ll have some leisure on my hands here, and then duty obtrudes itself; but I’m sure, this year, that things will quiet down.”

“I know you have to keep on paying alimony,” Emily said, “to that Laura Hopedale, who doesn’t need it, and besides, you support Harold and …”

Tom raised his hand deliberately. Emily never could learn the value of reticence or when it was time to stop if she had an interested audience, and possibly it paid her not to learn.

“Tell Walter the rest after I’ve gone, dear,” he said. “Don’t be hurt with me, but I think I know what else you’re going to say.”

He seldom needed to wonder what Emily was going to say. The unreality of the theatre world had descended heavily upon the breakfast scene. It was no wonder that people in the theatre found it hard to get on with outsiders and ended by clinging together in self-defense. Most of their lives were conducted in disproportionate make-believe, and dramatic effect was actually an unnatural phenomenon requiring years of cultivation. The gesture and the word that interested an audience across the footlights were peculiar deviations from ordinary life. A special talent was required to select such technicalities. No wonder the conversation in the dining room had been off the normal beat. No wonder the house was decorated with large, bold strokes, and no wonder he was not the man he used to be. He had lived so long with flamboyant personalities, had been obliged to cope so long with what was called artistic temperament, and had been compelled to deal so long and charmingly and patiently with actors’ and actresses’ stupidities, that of course his own character had changed.