She only pressed her cheek to his.
"Will you know how to find it?"
She only pressed her cheek to his again, around on the other side of his face.
She allowed him to precede her there, as was her womanly prerogative. But once he had arrived, she kept him waiting no more than the fractional part of a minute. In fact so precipitately did she enter, on his very heels, that it could almost have been thought she had been waiting at some nearby vantage point simply to allow him first entry before starting forward in turn.
She accosted him before he had little more than cleared the vestibuk.
"Louis," she said, placing her hand confidentially atop his wrist to detain him a moment, and drawing him a step aside, "I have been thinking about this since you left the house. I am not sure I--I want you to do this after all. You may think me one of these presuming wives who-- Had we not better let things be as they are-- ?"
He patted her arresting wrist. "Not another word, Julia," he said with fine masculine authority. "I want it so."
He was now sure that the idea was his own, had been from its very inception.
She deferred to his dictate as it was a wife's place to do, with a seemly little obeisance of her head. She linked her arm in his and accompanied him with slow-moving elegance across the bank floor toward its farther end, where the bank manager had emerged and stood waiting to greet them with courtly consideration behind a low wooden partition banister set with amphora-shaped uprights erected three-square about his private office door. He was a moonfaced gentleman, the roundness of his face emphasized by the circular fringe of carefully waved iron-gray whiskers that surrounded it, the lips and sides of the cheeks clean-shaven. The gold chain across his plaid vest front must have been composed of the thickest links in all New Orleans, a veritable anchor.
Even he, the establishment's head, visibly swelled like a pouterpigeon at sight of Julia advancing toward him. The pride she afforded Durand, in escorting her, in itself, would have made the entire proceeding worth while had there been no other reason.
She had donned, for this unwonted invasion of the precincts of commerce and finance, azure crinoline, that filled the arid air with whispers, midget pink velvet buttons in symmetrical rows studding its jerking, pink ruching sprouting at her throat and wrists; a crushed bonnet of azure velvet low over one eye like a tinted compress to relieve a headache, ribbons of pink tying it under her chin, a dwarf veil sprinkled with pink dots like confetti hanging only as low as the underlashes of her eyes. Her steps were as tiny and tapping as though she were on stilts, and her spine was held in the forwardcurved bow of the Grecian bend almost to a point where it defied Nature's plan that the human figure hold itself upright on the hip sockets, without falling over forward out of sheer unbalance.
Never had a bustle floated so airily, swaying so languorously, over a bank floor before. Her passage created a sensation behind the tellers' cagelike windows lining both sides of the way. Pair upon pair of eyes beneath their green eyeshades were lifted from dry, stuffy figures and accounts to gaze dreamily after her. The personnel of banking establishments at that time was exclusively male, the clientele almost equally so. Though a discreetly curtained-off little nook, as rigidly segregated as a harem anteroom, bearing over it the placard "Ladies' Window," was reserved for the use of the occasional females (widows and the like) who were forced to come in person to see to their money matters, having no one else to attend to these grubby transactions for them. At least they were spared the ignominy of having to rub elbows with men in the line, or stand exposed to all eyes while money was publicly handed to them. They could curtain themselves off and be dealt with by a special teller reserved for their use alone, and always a good deal gentler and older than the rest.
There was no definite stigma attached to banks, for women; unlike saloons, and certain types of theatrical performance where tights were worn, and almost all forms of athletic contest, such as boxing matches and ball games. It was just that they were to be spared the soilage implicit in the handling of money, which was still largely a masculine commodity and therefore an indelicate one for them.
Durand and his breath-taking (but properly escorted) wife stopped before the whiskered bank manager, and he swung open a little hinged gate in the banister-rail for their passage.
Durand said, "May I present Mr. Simms to you, my dear? A good friend of mine."
Mr. Simms said with a gallant inclination, "I am inclined to doubt that, or you would not have delayed this for so long."
She cast her eyes fetchingly at him, certainly not in flirtation, for that would have been discreditable to Durand, but at least in a sort of beguiling playfulness.
"I am surprised," she said, and allowed that to stand alone, the better to make her point with what followed.
"How so?" Simms asked uncertainly.
She gave the compliment to Durand, to be passed on by him, instead of directly, face to face. "I had thought until now all bank managers were old and rather forbidding looking."
Mr. Simms' vest buttons had never had a greater strain put upon them, not even after Sunday meals.
She said next, looking about her with ingenuous interest, "I have never been in a bank before. What a superb marble floor."
"We are rather proud of that," Mr. Simms conceded.
They entered the office. They seated themselves, Mr. Simms seeing to her chair himself.
They chatted for several moments on a purely social plane, business still having the grace to conceal itself behind a preliminary screen of sociability, even where men alone were involved. (Always providing they were of an equal level.) To come too bluntly to the point without a little pleasant garnishing first was considered bad mannered. But year by year the garnishing was growing less.
At last Durand remarked, "Well, we mustn't take too much of Mr. Simms' time, I know he's a busy man."
The point had now arrived.
"In what way can I be of service to you?" Simms inquired.
"I should like to arrange," said Durand, "for my wife to have full use of my account here, along with myself."
"Oh, really," she murmured disclaimingly, upping one hand. "He insists--"
"Quite simple," said Simms. "We merely change the account from a single one, as it now stands, to a joint account, to be participated in by both." He sought out papers on his desk, selected two. "And to do that all I have to do is ask you both for your signatures, just once each. You on this authorization form. And you, my dear, on this blank form card, just as a record of your signature, so that it will be known to us and we may honor it."
Durand was already signing, forehead inclined.
Simms edged forward another paper tentatively, asked him: "Did you wish this on both accounts, the savings as well as the checking, or merely the one?"
"It may as well be both alike, and have done with it, while we're about it," Durand answered unhesitatingly. He wasn't a grudging gift-giver, and any other answer, it seemed to him, would have been an ungracious one.
"Lou," she protested, but he silenced her with his hand.
Simms was already offering her the inked pen for her convenience. She hesitated, which at least robbed the act of seemingly undue precipitation. "How shall I sign? Do I use my own Christian name, or--?"
"Perhaps your full marriage name might be best. 'Mrs. Louis Durand.' And then you'll remember to repeat that exactly each time you draw a check."
"I shall try," she said obediently.
He blotted solicitously for her.
"Is that all ?" she asked, wide-eyed.
"That's quite all there is to it, my dear."
"Oh, that wasn't so bad, was it ?" She looked about her in delighted relief, almost like a child who has been dreading a visit to the dentist only to find nothing painful has befallen her.
The two men exchanged a look of condescending masculine superiority, in the face of such inexperience. Their instincts made them like women to be that way.