Part 58 (2/2)

That they welcomed her almost with tears of joy, and that her improved appearance and spirits gave them genuine parental delight was only a part of her new experience. Mrs. Converse wanted her to settle down with Teddy in her old room. Martie would not do that; she must be near the subway, she said, but she promised them many a Sunday dinner-hour.

”And that Mrs. Dryden got divorced, but she never married again,”

marvelled the old lady mildly.

”Oh, she didn't marry her doctor, then?”

”No, I think somebody told Doctor that she couldn't. Wasn't she just the kind of woman who could spoil the lives of two good men? Somebody told Doctor that the doctor was reconciled to his wife, and they went away from New York, but I don't know.”

Martie wondered. She thought that she would look up the doctor's name in the telephone book, anyway, and perhaps chance an anonymous telephone call. Suppose she asked for Mrs. Cooper, and Adele answered?

But before she did so, she met Adele. She had held her new position for six weeks then, and Indian Summer was giving way to the delicious coolness of the fall. Martie was in a department store, Teddy beside her, when a woman came smiling up to her, and laid a hand on her arm.

She recognized a changed Adele. The beauty was not gone, but it seemed to have faded and shrunk upon itself; Adele's bright eyes were ringed with lead, the old coquetry of manner was almost shocking.

”Martie,” said Adele, ”this is my sister, Mrs. Baker.”

Mrs. Baker, a big wholesome woman, who looked, Martie thought, as if she might have a delicate daughter, married young, and a husband prominent in the Eastern Star, and be herself a clever bridge player, and a most successful hostess and guest at women's hilarious lunch-eons, looked at the stranger truculently. She was a tightly corseted woman, with prominent teeth, and a good-natured smile. Martie felt sure that she always had good clothes, and wore white shoes in summer, and could be generous without any glimmering of a sense of justice. She was close to fifty.

”How do, Mrs. Bannister,” she said heartily. ”I've heard Adele mention your name. How do you think she looks? I think she looks like death.

How do, dear?” she added to Teddy. ”Are you mama's boy? I don't live in New York like you do; I live in Browning, Indiana. Don't you think that's a funny place to live? But it's a real pretty place just the same.”

”Have you had your lunch?” Adele was asking. ”We haven't. I was kept by the girl at the milliner's--”

It was one o'clock on a Sat.u.r.day afternoon. Martie was free to lunch where she pleased. She was free even to sit down with a woman whose name was under a cloud. They all crowded into an express elevator, and sat down at a table in the restaurant on the twelfth floor.

Presently the unreality of it faded from Martie's uppermost consciousness and she began to enjoy herself. To sit with the wife of a Mystic Shriner, and the woman who had done what Adele had done, and whose husband incidentally was deeply devoted to herself, was not according to Monroe. But she was in New York!

”I guess I was a silly girl, misled by a man of the world,” Adele was saying in her old, complaining, complacent voice. ”I know I was a fool, Martie, but don't men do that sort of thing all the time, and get over it? Why should us women pay all the time? You know as well as I do that John Dryden was just as queer as d.i.c.k's hatband; I was hungering, as a girl will, for pleasure and excitement--”

”It was a dirty crime, the way that doctor acted,” Mrs. Baker contributed, her tone much pleasanter than her words. ”He must have been a skunk, if you ask me. Adele here was wrong, Mrs. Bannister; you and I won't quarrel about that. But Adele wasn't nothing but a child at heart--”

”I believed anything he told me!” Adele drawled, playing with her knife and fork, her lashes dropped.

”Dryden,” the loyal sister continued majestically, ”threw her over the second he got a chance; that's what she got for putting up with HIM for all those years! And then, if you please, this other feller discovers that he can't get rid of his wife. I came on then,” she said warmly as Martie murmured her sympathy, ”and I says to Adele, throw the whole crowd of them down. Billy Baker and I have plenty, and my daughter--Ruby, she's a lovely girl and she's married an elegant feller whose people own about all the lumber interests in our part of the country--she doesn't need anything from us. But if you ask me, it's just about killed Adele,” she went on frankly, glancing at her sister, ”she looks like a sick girl to me. We came on two or three days ago, to see a specialist about her, and I declare I'll be glad to get her back.”

”What has become of Dr. Cooper?” Martie felt justified in asking.

”He lost all the practice he ever had, they say,” Mrs. Baker said viciously. ”And good enough for him, too! His wife won't even see him, and he lives at some boarding-house; and serve him right!”

”And Jack's book such a success!” Adele said, widening her eyes at Martie. ”Do you ever see him?”

”He's got a great friend in Dean Silver, the novelist,” Martie answered composedly. ”I believe they're abroad.”

”The idea!” Adele said lifelessly. She was playing with her bracelets now, and looked about her in an aimless way.

”Well, if this little girl has any sense she'll let the past be the past,” remarked the optimistic Mrs. Baker. ”There's a fellow out our way, Joe Chase; he's got a cattle ranch. You never heard of him? He's a di'mond in the rough, if you ask me, but he's been crazy about Adele ever since she first visited me. He'd give her anything in G.o.d's world.”

”But I think I'd die of loneliness winters!” Adele said, with the smile of a petted child.

So there was a third man eager to sacrifice his life to her, Martie marvelled. Adele would consider herself a martyr if she succ.u.mbed to the wiles of the rough diamond; she would puzzle and distress him in his ranch-house; she would Fret and exact and complain. Probably one of the Swedish farmers thereabout could give him a daughter who would make him an infinitely better wife, and bear him children, and wors.h.i.+p him blindly. But no; he must yearn for this neurotic, abnormal little creature, with her ugly history and her barren brain and body.

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