The unwed brunette said knowingly, “Remington Ramsay is too smooth to make a clumsy grab at poor unworldly Mavis. I know what he’s up to. They were up there poking and fussing at the walls and woodwork until he had her giggling like a schoolgirl. He means to take his own sweet time on all that repairing and redecorating, and then he means to come at her with flowers, candy, and a proposal of marriage!”
Longarm laughed out loud and asked, “You figure that’s a dirty way to treat a lady?”
To which she replied, offering him a ham-on-rye sandwich, “It is when that’s not what you’re really after! I told you I was keeping an eye, and an ear, on them. I heard him telling her he could repaper all of your room and the front hall cheap if she’d settle for new paper in some other design. He invited her right out to come over to his hardware store and go through all the pattern books he had to show off. But that was only the half of it! He got to picking at loose wallpaper hither and yon, like it was scabby, and then he marveled out loud that Mavis and her poor dead Martin had started out with all the upstairs walls done in old stocks and bonds.”
As she poured lemon punch in tumblers for the two of them Longarm said, “I commented on it when I saw all those pictures of Confederate officials and railroad engines. To tell the truth I’d worry more about a man without glasses pretending they weren’t there at all. Say, this is sure a swell ham sandwich, ma’am!”
She handed him his drink saying, “Thank you. I made it myself, in the dark, speaking of sneaks. I didn’t think you’d want me telling anyone where you were. Mavis asked if I knew where you were when you didn’t come back after that oily hardware monger left. Can’t you see he’s after her property, like that other wretch who trifled with her affections?”
Longarm washed down some ham and rye with the lemon punch she must have mixed in the dark as well. He grinned and said, “Lord love you, you put just the right amount of lemon juice in this rum, Miss Ellen. As to Remington Ramsay, aside from his bragging book, I now know for a fact that he already owns considerable property here in Pawnee Junction and he never had to marry up with anyone he didn’t like to get it. As a dealer in lumber and hardware who got in on the ground floor, he was naturally set to buy building sites and build on them cheap, for sale or rental. He must be rich enough by now. I haven’t had time to find out what those Credit Mobilier bonds and stock certificates are worth. I told you I’d try. How much time do you figure we have before the minister calls out for us to speak now or forever hold our peace?”
She didn’t smile back. She said, “This is serious, Custis. Mavis must be more hard-up than I thought. She barely knew Remington Ramsay, as a tradesman, and now he has her blushing and gushing as if they were already courting. You mark my word, he’ll be in her bed long before any minister has anything to say about it!”
Then she gasped, blushed darkly in the lamplight, and looked flustered. “Oh, I shouldn’t have spoken so boldly to a man! Whatever must you think of me?”
He said soothingly, “That’s all right. I’ve read what Miss Virginia Woodhull has to say about honesty betwixt the genders, and she makes a lot of sense. Albeit I ain’t sure I go along with her on women smoking in public. Not cigars leastways.”
The perky librarian had just taken a sip of the mighty strong lemon punch—she didn’t seem hungry—when her big sloe eyes took in books she’d left on the table. Longarm had replaced them on the far side of the lamp. The library girl gasped, “Good heavens, what are those books doing there?”
To which Longarm could only reply, “Somebody must have put them there. I know I never did. But to tell the truth, I’ve read them both before.”
She giggled and said, “You ought to be ashamed of yourself! Or does everyone in a big city such as Denver practice free love in the Oriental manner?”
He washed down the last of his first sandwich and reached for a second as he delicately replied, “Not all the folks in Denver, ma’am, just the high-toned folks on Capitol Hill and the low-lifes down on the flood plain of the South Platte. I read somewhere how prosperous middle-class folks worry more about Queen Victoria’s notions of prim and proper behavior than Queen Victoria seems to. Neither the folks with no education nor the folks with a heap of education seem to worry as much about such matters.”
She poured herself more refreshment as she confided, wide-eyed, how she’d read the same thing, asking in a breathless tone if Longarm thought those rumors about the Widow of Windsor and her burly Scotch butler, Mr. Brown, were true.
Longarm washed down some grub and replied with a shrug that he was in no position to say, adding, “I hardly ever get invited to Windsor Castle, and when I do stay over Her Majesty never invites me into her bedchamber. I figure it’s up to the lady and anyone she might invite to say what goes on behind closed doors.”
Ellen stared thoughtfully at him in the soft light of her secret nest as she mused, “I guess there’s no harm if no harm’s done. Do you think that’s what those sophisticated high-society folks have to say about the wild and wicked things they do?”
He said, “Ain’t sure it’s wicked if you’re smart enough to temper your wildness with sensible precautions. Dumb trashy folks wind up in all sorts of trouble, with no moral code, because it’s dumb to just do anything you want, with anybody, at any time. Ain’t no way a man can get drunk and trifle with his baby sister in a public place without somebody calling the law. On the other hand, as long as Queen Victoria and that brawny Scot wait until they’re all alone, and lock the door, there’s just no saying what they may or may not be getting away with.”
She sighed and said, “It seems unfair to the rest of us. Why are us middle-class girls denied all the fun of either discreet or foolish fun?”
Longarm told her cautiously, “It’s likely on account of the middle-class men you hang around with. There’s a heap to be said for middle-class morality. It keeps life simple and nobody looks foolish if they just behave all the time as if somebody was watching.”
She finished her drink, started to pour another, then reached for the lamp’s trimmer as she demurely asked if Longarm thought anyone was watching.
He replied just as innocently, “Why don’t we put out that lamp so nobody could see what we’re up to in any case?”
So then the cellar was plunged in ink-black darkness and Ellen was all over him in the dark, with nothing on under that thin summer dress she’d left the house in. So in less time than it took her to say she couldn’t understand what had gotten into her, he’d gotten into her and she seemed to want more, despite her small size, in every way, as he pounded her good on that firm army cot.
It sure seemed a caution how women could be so different without having to be ugly. The petite brunette’s smaller but plumper body was not only a swell contrast, but her approach to enjoying the mutual pleasure was nothing like the forceful screwing of Nurse Nancy Calder, bless them both.
Bubbly little Ellen was one of those rare women blessed with a healthy appetite and uncomplicated plumbing. For all her reading of illustrated instruction books, she just liked a fair-size man on top and in her deep, with no cares in the world about tricky angles or difficult chords on her old banjo.
They came close together, the way lovers in romantic tragedies were supposed to. Then they got her sweetly rounded rump on a pillow and he felt sure, as he posted in the old love saddle with her soft thighs around his waist, that he’d never in this world find another gal whose whole body seemed so tailor-made to pleasure his. So when she moaned and begged him to leave it in her forever and never take it out, he found it easy to promise her he wouldn’t.
A man had to watch himself around gals like Ellen Brent. For they were tempting as hell, but naturally, nobody who screwed so swell the first night could avoid giving in quickly to the temptation all of womankind suffered. For reasons only someone like Professor Darwin might savvy, they all felt honor-bound to change a man for the better as soon as they had him wrapped around their fingers, and Ellen Brent was about as wrapping a gal as he’d met up with lately.