AN HOUR and a half later, he was making love to her on the Empire sofa in her parlor. She would not let him carry her into the bedroom, where they could have done their business in comfort. Straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel, as the Good Book said—that was milady Martha. He settled a small sofa pillow firmly under her hips, but the position was still not right. The sofa was too short and narrow and slippery as the devil—covered with some horsehair material that was probably all the rage now. It groaned as his bare knees sought to get a purchase on it, and moreover he was cold. Their little house, which was pretty enough, did not have central heating, and the coal fire, glowing in the grate, cast romantic shadows over the white paneling without giving any real heat. The room temperature, he reckoned, must be about 62°. There were no shades that could be drawn—only some white ruffled curtains of a thin material. He had turned the lights out when he had finally persuaded her to take her clothes off, but the fire illuminated the room so that anybody, looking in the window, could have seen their shadows, playing the beast with two backs, enlarged on the wall.
Sinnott could not possibly be back for another hour and a quarter. Miles had looked at his watch, to check, before having at her, when he had downed his highball. He could have done without the drink, but Martha, being what she was, had had to go through the pretense of having asked him in for a nightcap, and they had wasted fifteen minutes, making polite conversation, looking over the house and admiring the big old fireplaces and the wide boards of the floors. He had been curious, as a matter of fact, to see how they lived: she was still a good housekeeper, evidently, and the rooms reflected her personality, at once gay and austere; he could see Sinnott’s influence in the number of art books scattered about and in the nice old Victorian sets in the white bookcases. He would have preferred, however, to prowl around on some other occasion, without Martha at his heels, explaining the history of everything. There was nothing here he could identify as belonging to the period of their marriage; the few family things her mother had sent her, old Swedish stuff mostly, had gone up in the fire. Yet he had a queer sense of recognition. Some of the chairs, the wallpapers, the frying pans hanging in the kitchen, the wire lettuce basket, a violet cushion, all looked like old friends to him. She had built her nest again, like a bird, out of the same materials. It agitated him to see this. “You had this before,” he said, almost accusingly, picking up a little bronze Italian figure and turning it over in his hand. “No,” she averred, but when he pressed her, she admitted that she had had one something like it.
As he stood in the kitchen doorway, watching her make the drinks (he and Helen had a bar in the living room, with a vacuum jug that was kept full of ice cubes), her familiar tussle with the ice tray plucked at the strings of his memory. “Let me do that,” he said, when she started trying to open the soda water. He took the opener and the bottle from her, noting her quick flush of surprise. She was thinking, of course, that he had never helped her before. He followed her back into the parlor, observing the motion of her hips, which pranced a little as she walked, with short, incisive steps, in her high-heeled shoes. Up to that moment, he had not been sure whether he wanted to dally with her or not. But now the old Adam in him sat up and took notice. They were alone, hubby was gone—why not? He stood by the fireplace, pretending to examine a picture. She sat down on the sofa opposite him. There was one of those pregnant silences. He tossed off his highball, wiped his lips, took a quick look at his watch, and started across the room for her.
She had struggled at first, quite violently, when he flung himself on top of her on the sofa. But he had her pinioned beneath him with the whole weight of his body. She could only twist her head away from him, half-burying it in one of the sofa pillows while he firmly deposited kisses on her neck and hair. Her resistance might have deterred him if he had not been drinking, but the liquor narrowed his purpose. He was much stronger than she was, besides being in good condition, and he did not let her little cries of protest irritate him as they once might have done. The slight impatience he felt with her was only for the time she was wasting. She wanted it, obviously, or she would not have asked him in. The angry squirming of her body, the twisting and turning of her head, filled him with amused tolerance and quickened his excitement as he crushed his member against her reluctant pelvis. He had no intention of raping her, and it injured him a little to feel how she pressed her thighs, which she had managed to cross, tightly together to protect the inner sanctum, when all he wanted, for the moment, was to hold her in his arms.
Her hair slipped from its pins, and he seized the long tress eagerly in his hands, pressing his mouth into it and inhaling deeply. From the sofa pillow came a muffled cry of disgust; when she turned her head, finally, to mutter “Stop,” he planted kisses on her cheek and ear. Breathing in the fragrance of her hair, nuzzling in her neck, he grew almost worshipful and ceased to hold her securely. Seeing this, she at once scrambled over onto her stomach and lay taut, as if waiting. Encouraged, he sought the zipper on the side of her dress—women’s clothes always bamboozled him—but she took advantage of his preoccupation to struggle up to a sitting position and began to push him away, with her small hands against his chest. She was wearing a high-necked black dress of thin wool; he could see her small, full breasts, like ripe pears, straining against the material, and he bent down to taste them through the wool. But she would not permit this; her hands sprang up, blocking his approach, as he bore her down again. He kissed her white neck and the hollow of her throat, but whenever he tried to reach her mouth, she turned her head away sharply.
He began to get the idea. The thing was to respect her scruples. She did not seem to mind if he kissed her arms and shoulders; it was her breasts and mouth she was protecting, out of some peculiar pedantry. And yet she was not really frightened. She did not scream or try to hit him or scratch him, as she might have, and he, on his side, did not try to raise her skirt. The struggle was taking place in almost complete silence, as if they were afraid of being overheard. There was only the sound of their breathing and an occasional muffled “Stop” from Martha. They made him think of a pair of wrestlers, heaving and gasping, while taking care to obey the rules. A string of beads she was wearing broke and clattered to the floor. “Sorry,” he muttered as he dove for her left breast.
He heard Martha laugh faintly as she pushed his head away from her tit. The humor of it was beginning to dawn on her, evidently. She was too ironic a girl not to see that one screw, more or less, could not make much difference, when she had already laid it on the line for him about five hundred times. His hunger for her now, when he was so well fixed up at home, was a compliment, which she ought to accept lightly. That was the trouble with intelligent women; there was always an esprit de sérieux lingering around the premises. They lacked a sense of proportion. But she was commencing to see it from his angle; her struggles were becoming more perfunctory. “You want it, say you want it,” he mumbled in her ear. He was getting exasperated, foreseeing that he would be nervous during the act itself if she did not stop procrastinating.
She shook her disheveled head and wrenched away from him, but just then he found her back zipper. He tugged, and the steel moved on its tracks; the back of her dress fell open. He could feel her stiffen, as he moved his hand, carefully, under her slip, up and down her spine and over her smooth shoulder blades. He bent down to kiss her there, and she did not try to stop him; her back, apparently, was not covered by the ground rules. She lay almost torpid, and he ventured to try to pull her dress off the shoulders in front. “Don’t,” she cried sharply, as the material started to tear. She sat up in indignation, and his hand slipped in and held her breast cupped. “Take it off,” he urged, speaking of her dress in a thick whisper. “I can’t,” she whispered back, as his other hand stole in and grasped her other breast. They began to argue in whispers. She mentioned Helen, the Coes, New Leeds, but not—and this was curious—her husband. “Please don’t,” she begged, with tears in her eyes, while he squeezed her nipples between his fingertips; they were hard before he touched them; her breath was coming quickly. She had caught his lower lip between her teeth, and there was a drawn look on her face, which meant that she was ready for it. “Stop, Miles, I beg you,” she moaned, with a terrified air of throwing herself on his mercy. “It won’t make any difference,” he promised hoarsely. She shook her head, but as they were arguing, she let him slip her dress off her shoulders. He freed her breasts from her underslip and stared at them hungrily. Martha’s eyes closed and she took a deep breath, like a doomed person. “All right,” she said.
Glancing at her wrist watch, she got up and took her dress off and put it on a chair while he hastily undressed himself and turned off the lights. But to have allowed this interval was a mistake. Women were funny that way—give them time to think and the heat goes off, downstairs; he had often observed it. Now he found, once he had got well started, with her arms and legs where he wanted them, that she was no longer responding. She had a lot of will power and she had probably figured out, while she was undressing, that she would not “really” be unfaithful to Sinnott if she did not come to climax. Or else she had begun feeling remorseful. She was nice enough about it; she went through all the motions, trying to give him a good time. But he could not really rouse her, and it took the heart out of him. He regretted the whole business before he was halfway through. He detected that she was trying to hurry him, which made him stubborn, though he was colder than a witch’s tit and anxious to get home. Her movements subsided; her limbs became inert. It occurred to him, with a start, that she was actually very drunk, though she had not showed it especially. Compunction smote him; he ought not to have done this, he said to himself tenderly. Tenderness inflamed his member. Clasping her fragile body brusquely to him, he thrust himself into her with short, quick strokes. A gasp of pain came from her, and it was over.
She got up, staggering a little, and disappeared, with her clothes—into the bathroom, presumably. He dressed himself hurriedly by the fireside and stood, warming his hands, waiting for her to come back. He could not hear a sound, except the gurgling of the fire; in the stillness, the house seemed deserted. Alarm overtook him. He turned on the lamps and at once felt conspicuous, as if in a show window. The room had a sordid, disarrayed look. There were scattered beads everywhere and big bone hairpins; the sofa had skewed around, out of position, and a small rug was caught in the casters. For two bits, he would have gone home, subito, but he was afraid to leave without knowing what had happened to her. It struck him that she might have passed out. He glanced at his watch and at the clock on the mantel, which had stopped, evidently forever, at a quarter of three. He remembered her talk at the Coes’ and he felt as if the eye of eternity were on him, as he paced up and down, irresolutely, smoking a cigarette. When he finished it, he said to himself, he would go and look for her. Suppose he had injured her? Or supposed she had cut her wrists or taken poison, in a fit of self-dramatization? The veins stood out on his forehead. He was tempted, to make himself scarce, while the coast was clear. He stamped out his cigarette, impatiently, and opened his mouth to call “Martha!” in his peremptory baritone. But his vocal cords failed him; he was afraid to make a noise. He waited a little longer.
Just as he was at his wits’ end, she came back, wearing a pink dressing gown and a pair of slippers, with her hair, combed, down her back. This domestic image made him feel awkward and remorseful, like the sight of his mother in curlers and wrapper, waiting for him on the stairway of their Yonkers house when he had been out roistering with the gang. “Are you all right?” he said, finally, staring into her pale face. Her eyes had turned black, like two big raw prunes, and she looked a little the worse for liquor, though she had put fresh lipstick on. She nodded, smiling faintly. He wanted to assure her, from the bottom of his heart, that what had just occurred would never happen again, but he felt it would sound impolite to say so. “Good-bye, Miles,” said Martha gently. He could not make out whether that was meant to be symbolic or whether she was impatient to get him out of here. He took her hand and kissed her hastily on the forehead. “You’d better clean this up,” he jerked out, with a blunt gesture around the room. Then he turned and beat it. But as he started down the hill to where his car was parked, he stole a look back at the house, and to his relief he could see her through the thin curtains moving about the parlor, busily straightening up.
Miles had not enjoyed it much either, Martha said pensively to herself, as she picked up the beads from the parlor floor. It had been like an exercise in gluttony; they had both grasped for a morsel they did not really want. But she did not feel especially bad for what they had done. Now that it was over, it appeared to have been inevitable. She had thought it all out while she had been lingering in the bathroom, dousing her face in cold water to sober herself up and hoping that he would leave, so that she would not have to talk to him again. She had brought it on herself, she supposed. She ought not to have asked him in, knowing that it was a risk, even as they stood in her doorway. But it had been one of those challenges that she always rose to, like a fish to the bait—the fear of being afraid. And she still did not think that Miles had brought her home with the set purpose of seducing her. It had happened all by itself, invitus, invitam. In the end, he had done it, she reckoned, just because it was obvious; it was a kind of strength in him not to fear banality but to step right up to it like a man at a free-lunch counter.
She could not deny that she had asked for it, if only by her imprudence. Yet when he had first landed on her, she had felt like laughing. She could not take it seriously. All the while she was struggling, she had been suppressing a smile, at his ridiculous searching for her zipper (he had never been able to find anything), at the blunt simplicity of his onset that took her consent for granted. Her chief worry, at first, had been that he would break the sofa. She had not been alarmed for her virtue, feeling certain that she could free herself once he grasped the sincerity of her objections. She was disgusted with him for slavering over her hair, but since she could not stop him, she resigned herself—that was the way he was, and his enjoyment could not harm her. This inability to feel outrage was of course her undoing. Even when her dress was open, she could not summon wrath sufficient to warrant scratching him or kicking him to keep him from exploring her back. Then, once he had touched her breast, she no longer, so it had seemed to her, had the right to refuse him. It was like that thing in law, where if you let somebody cross your property without hindrance, they finally secure a right of way. A drunken notion of equity had been beating at her mind, even as she pushed and parried—the idea that one more time could not possibly count and that she was being preposterous.
And she still felt the force of this reasoning, even now, as she methodically filled the ice tray and carried it, spilling, across the kitchen to the icebox. The only thing that shamed her, looking back on the encounter, was the fact that her senses had awakened under Miles’s touch. She would have liked to blot out that part, which was only a minute or two, from her memory. But honesty compelled her to remember, with a half-desirous shudder, that moment when his hand had first squeezed her expectant breast and languorous delight had possessed her, like a voluptuary.
She made a face and proceeded unsteadily to the bathroom. But as she stood there, brushing her teeth, her sensuality relived those few moments, and she longed for John to come home. Disgusted with herself, she rinsed out her mouth and spat into the basin. Nothing, she thought angrily, could be more immoral than utilizing your husband, whom you loved, to slake the desires kindled by another man, whom you detested. Moreover, her practical side added, she would be very unattractive to him in her present condition, still half-tight, swaying a little, and smelling of stale alcohol. He would be cross with her, anyway, for going to the Coes’ and getting drunk and seeing Miles again. And he would be right; it could not have come out worse if he had predicted it himself.
Misgivings overtook her. He would be bound to find out that Miles had driven her home. Should she admit that she had asked him in or not? Tomorrow he might notice that there was an inch or so missing from the bottle of Scotch. She took three aspirins and drank two glasses of water, revolving the problem in her mind. She could say Miles had come in for a drink and made a pass at her, which was true enough but hard on Miles; or she could say he had come in for a drink and not made a pass at her, which was kind but hard on John’s credulity. Or she could say that he had left her at the door and blame the missing whiskey, if John noticed it, on the handyman, who was notorious for taking liquor whenever he came into a house. Martha steadied herself on the wash basin and stared at her flushed face in the mirror. She would never have thought that she could entertain such wicked ideas even for a second.
A shiver ran through her. She had not realized how cold the house was. Poor Miles, she thought, picturing his big white perspiring body, clad only in socks and garters, exposed to the drafts of the parlor. And it would be a miracle if she herself did not get sick from lying naked on the sofa in late October, with only a coal fire going. John would never forgive her if he knew of this piece of heedlessness. If she died, he would be furious and blame it all on the Coes. She smiled fondly, thinking of John’s oddities, and hurried into bed. He liked to assign blame, arbitrarily, in military style. And he would be more annoyed if she caught cold than at any other feature of the seduction. Dear John, she said to herself. He would doubtless find a way of making New Leeds the villain of the whole episode, assuming she were to tell him. But she could not risk telling him, and precisely for that reason. Being intelligent and perceptive, he might forgive her and Miles and even see the absurd logic of it. But he would have to find some target for his stores of blame.
She sighed, hugging the blankets to her. The best thing would be to say that she had had Miles in for a drink and then gloss over the next part. If he asked whether Miles had made a pass, it would be wisest to say yes, just a little one; if she denied it, he might doubt the whole story. The one thing to fear, aside from her getting a cold (for which he would certainly hold the Coes’ play-reading responsible), was that he would discover that her jet-and-crystal necklace had been broken. He had given it to her, two years ago, for her birthday, and though it could be restrung, he would never feel quite the same about it, like the watch, which was a gift too. John had a peculiar attitude toward fragile, delicate things—among which he included herself. He loved them angrily, foreseeing their destruction, and did not want them to be used, except on the highest occasions. This attitude always vexed Martha. It seemed to her somehow undemocratic. She believed firmly in use. That, in a sense, was what had got her into trouble tonight—with Miles, she could not treat herself as a precious vase to be kept on a top shelf, like their Bohemian glass, which she insisted on using too. And yet look what had happened. Her dress was a wreck—she would have to mend it and iron it the next time John went away; her necklace was broken; she had started lying and deceiving and thinking of implicating the poor handyman. And she would probably have an awful hangover.
She buried her head in the pillow and resolutely went to sleep. When she woke, it was daylight and the place beside her was empty. She came into full consciousness instantly and sprang up in bed, her heart pounding with terror. Her watch said eight o’clock. He should have been home five hours ago. She listened; the house was silent. Not even the pump was running. Flinging off the covers, she vaulted out of bed and sped in her bare feet across the cold floors up to the guest bedroom. There was no one there. A ringing scream came out of her. It smote her with utter certainty that he had somehow come home and seen them there through the window and quietly gone away forever. She tried to reason with herself. After all, she had looked at her watch before Miles turned out the lights, and it had been only a quarter of two. Nobody could have made it from Boston in that time. And she had looked again, at two-twenty, after Miles had left. John must have been killed in an accident.
But her common sense refused to credit this. The police would have called her. A hideous thought came to her. Perhaps her watch had been wrong. Suppose it had started losing more than its allotted twenty minutes a day? And now that she thought about it, she could not remember setting it ahead yesterday morning, as she usually did, right after breakfast—the day had been upset with John’s leaving early. Another memory jogged her. When Warren came to fetch her last night, she had been surprised: she had not expected him so early. “Oh, my God!” she heard herself cry. Her watch said eight-five now, but it might be much later. The clock in the parlor had stopped last week, when John tried to fix it himself; he could not get the pendulum back right. She stumbled to the telephone. But the operator said: “I am sorree; we are not allowed to give out the time.” She tried the Coes’ number; it was busy. Dolly had no telephone, and she and John had no radio. Outside, it had stopped raining, but the gray sky did not reveal whether it was morning or afternoon. A peculiar inhibition checked her when she thought of calling the Hubers; she did not know them well enough, she considered, to call them and ask them the time. She could call the vicomte and ask the time casually while ordering some liquor. She picked up the phone and set it down again irresolutely, stricken with shyness, like stage fright. She perhaps did not want to hear what time it was, for then she would know the worst for certain.
The only thing that mattered was to find John and try to explain it all to him. But she did not know how to set about this. Her hand went out again to the telephone, but she shrank from calling the police. If he had been killed in an automobile accident, she did not want to know. The only course that seemed really feasible was to go back to sleep. Numbly, she started to the bedroom. Someone, eventually, would come and find her there, hiding under the covers. She got into bed and closed her eyes but opened them almost at once as another cry escaped her. “I can’t stand it,” she moaned. And indeed it seemed to her that she could not endure another moment of existence. She began to sob aloud, as if from a physical pain.
Unable to stay in bed, she wandered into the parlor and wanly commenced to rebuild the fire, and as she knelt crouched by the hearth, weeping, she noticed that black and crystal beads were lying in the cracks between the floorboards and that two bone hairpins were in plain sight on the sofa. A strange relief swept through her. What if John had come home and seen this, she said to herself, forgetting that he had already, so she believed, seen everything. She poked out the beads and swept them into the dustpan, marveling at how tight she must have been last night to have presumed that she had cleaned them all up. And yet—as she now noticed for the first time—she did not have a hangover. She remembered reading somewhere that fear did something to your adrenaline and that pilots, during the war, never got hangovers on a flight, no matter how much they had drunk the night before. A wild laugh broke from her. What a price to pay for not having a hangover!
Just then, down the hill, she thought she heard a car’s motor. But she went back to building the fire, reluctant to look out the window, lest it not be he. In a moment, there was a knocking on the kitchen door. Nearly fainting, Martha went and pulled it open. It was only Jane Coe.
“Where’s John?” she demanded at once. Martha could not speak. She threw herself, sobbing, onto Jane’s bosom. “Gone,” she finally said. “Gone!” Jane hurried into the bathroom and got a wet washcloth to wash the tears and coal dust off Martha’s face, which gave Martha time to recover herself. In the first instant, she had wanted to confess everything and be comforted, but now caution intervened. “What time is it?” she asked huskily. It was quarter of nine, Jane said. Martha’s heart leapt with incredulous joy. Her own watch said eight-thirty. Therefore, therefore, she said to herself, her fears were groundless: he could not have seen anything. But then it came to her that he must be dead or injured, and though, two minutes before, she would have felt this was the lesser evil, now this new horror struck her with redoubled force. She moaned. “What happened? Did you have a fight? Why aren’t you dressed?” said Jane. “Or didn’t he come home last night?” Martha nodded, speechlessly, and burst into fresh sobs. “What did I tell you?” said Jane. “He probably spent the night in some tourist place, just the way I said.” “No,” retorted Martha. “He would have called me.” Jane looked grave. “Have you called the police?” Martha smiled sadly. “I was afraid to.”
Jane herself called the police and the hospital in Trowbridge. There was nothing. But they were sending out an alarm, though Martha was not much use there: she could not remember the car’s registration number or the year of the make. All she could say was that it had a New York license plate and was an old black Ford convertible.
Jane put a pot of coffee on and made Martha dress. Then she told the news she had brought with her: Warren’s mother had died. He was off to New York this morning on the little plane from Digby, and then on to Savannah, taking the afternoon plane. There was only one difficulty: he had no suit. “No suit?” exclaimed Martha, from the bedroom, trying to take an interest. Only his corduroy, it seemed, and that, agreed Martha, fighting down her tears, would not do for a funeral, not in the South, anyway. You must think of others, she said to herself. Jane is thinking of you. And she put her mind on the problem. “Well,” she suggested, coming back into the kitchen, “when he gets to New York, he can take a taxi in from the airfield and pick up something off the rack at Brooks Brothers. The fitter can probably baste the pants up while he waits.” But Jane did not take to this notion. She had had a better idea, it seemed. “What was that?” said Martha, absently. Jane lowered her eyes. “That blue suit of John’s,” she acknowledged. Martha buried her head in her arms on the kitchen table and began to laugh hysterically. “It’s gone,” she gasped. “Isn’t that ironical?” Jane gave her coffee, and she grew a little calmer. “Is that why you came?” she asked at length. Jane nodded. “Oh, dear,” said Martha. “Oh, dear. I’m sorry.”
She reflected. Actually, there was an old suit of John’s in the wardrobe, a dark gray, almost black, which he had never worn up here because it was too formal. The trousers were frayed at the bottom, but that would not matter, for Warren, since they could be turned up. She went to the bedroom and came back with the suit on a hanger. “Will this do?” she asked. Jane could not hide her delight. It was perfect, she declared, examining it as it lay draped over a kitchen chair on its hanger. There would just be the sleeves and trousers to fix. “Take it then,” said Martha, wiping her eyes with a paper napkin. It occurred to her that she was a monster to be lending John’s suit this morning, but she could find no reason not to, except a superstition, and the idea, too horribly practical to contemplate, that he might need it to be buried in himself. The gruesomeness of this interview was making Jane uncomfortable, and it was not Jane’s fault, Martha pointed out to herself, that John had not come home. “Go on, take it,” she said. Jane hesitated. “He’ll be all right, Martha,” she said, with real kindness, patting Martha’s shoulder. “I know,” lied Martha. She took a sip of coffee to show how brave she was going to be. “I ought to come and help you,” she added, uncertainly. This feeling was partly sincere. Jane needed somebody to help her get the suit ready; one person could work on the trousers and one on the sleeves. But she had expressed the wish aloud to show Jane that even in extremis she was capable of disinterestedness. If John were here, he would scold her for this.
She could not help feeling that Jane was being selfish, as she watched her hurry down the hill with the suit over her arm. It never occurred to Jane, apparently, to offer to go and get Dolly, so that Martha would not be alone. Martha closed her eyes, waiting for Jane to be gone. She knew she was going to scream again, as soon as the station-wagon drove off. When she opened them, she saw their convertible. “JOHN!” she heard Jane yell, and in a second there he was, climbing out of the car, smiling imperturbably as he always did after an absence; the knowledge that he was lovingly awaited made him matter of fact—he looked away, so to speak, from his arrival, as if it were a present he was bringing.
He had spent the night, he told them, by the side of the road, in the car. The driving had been terrible, and he had been sleepy. He had not called Martha because every place along the road was closed. He had not expected her to be silly and fearful, he added, tipping her chin. If he had known that, he would not have brought her a present—a white rose tree he had found for her at a nursery garden, next to the place where he had had breakfast. Martha studied him. He seemed rather strange and artificial, as he produced the rose tree from the car. If she had not herself had a bad conscience, she would have suspected him of being unfaithful. His story sounded very odd (though like him in a way) and she had good reason to be annoyed for the horrid suspense he had caused her. Yet it was lucky (if he only knew) that he had not come home last night and found the mess in the parlor. Everything, indeed, about his return was fortunate, even the fact that Warren’s mother had died, for they all went off at once, with the suit, to the Coes’ house, where Warren was packing and putting away his painting things. John did not ask her about last night; they were all too busy concentrating on getting Warren off on time. They tried the suit on him, and Martha shortened the sleeves and moved the buttons, while Jane did the trousers, which John then pressed with the steam-iron; he did it better than either of the girls. With all these hands working, the suit was ready in an hour, which left fifteen minutes for Warren to stop in Digby and pick up some black shoes. They did not talk much, out of respect for Warren’s mother; even Jane was quiet. It was Warren himself, finally, who brought up the subject of the play-reading. He asked Martha whether she and Miles had had a chance to go on with the discussion. “No,” said Martha, shortly, busy with her needle. She heard the iron pause. “Miles took you home?” John, in his shirtsleeves, his head bent over the ironing board, dropped the question casually. Martha, on the telephone, had promised him to go home with Dolly. Yes, she now acknowledged, in a slightly defiant voice; and she had asked him in for a drink. “You asked him in?” cried Jane, opening her mouth wide. “Why, you’re a nut, Martha. What happened? Did he make a pass at you?” They all turned their heads. Martha took her courage in her hands. “Of course not,” she said, smiling broadly. She held up the suit-coat and blushed. “Look at her,” said Jane. “Of course, he did. Confess, Martha.” Martha shook her head, stoutly. She put on a merry expression. “My lips are sealed,” she proclaimed. Warren, who was standing in his underclothes waiting to put on the trousers, had a grave, concerned look—what Martha called his jury face. But John let the matter drop lightly. “She doesn’t want to tell,” he said. “Martha is a gentleman.”
Afterward, in the car, on their way home, he asked her, with his eyes forward, on the road. “My lips are sealed,” she repeated, and added in a more serious tone, “Don’t ask me about it. It was nothing. For a minute, he misunderstood the invitation. One can’t really blame him.” John nodded. They drove on in silence, but she could see that he was satisfied. She put her hand over his on the steering wheel. “Did you spend the night on the road because you wanted to punish me for going to the play-reading?” “Maybe,” he said. “I thought so,” she replied. “But you’re not cross any more?” “No,” he said. “But we can’t have him dropping in all the time,” he added. Martha smiled. “He won’t.” She did not understand why he had decided not to scold her, but she accepted it as final. Men were like that; her father had been the same. They had tact at critical junctures, which was a sort of omniscience. And their mysterious decisions were final; she would not hear any more about the play-reading unless she brought it up herself. She essayed another subject. “Wasn’t it funny—about the suit?” she murmured. John laughed. “It was awful,” she went on, “when Jane came and I thought you were dead and I went and got out the suit anyway. It made me think of that poem of Yeats’s: ‘Twenty-one apparitions have I seen. The worst a coat upon a coathanger.’ ” She had not meant, by this, to reproach him, but he evidently thought she had, for his hand reached out and gripped hers tightly, in commiseration.