He was looking at her with a stunned expression. "You--you compare what happened that day at Mobile with buying a new hat?" he stammered.
She laughed. "No. Now you're twisting it around; making me out worse than I am. I know it's not punishable to buy a new hat, and the other thing is. I know you don't have to be afraid of anyone finding out you've bought a new hat, and you do of anyone finding out you've done the other thing. But that was just given for an example. You can remember a thing perfectly well, but you don't have to worry about it all the time, let it darken your life. That's all I mean."
But he was speechless; he still couldn't get past that horrendous illustration of hers.
She rose and moved over toward him slowly; stood at last, and looked down, and let her hand come to rest on his shoulder, with almost a patronizing air. Certainly not one of overweening admiration.
"Do you want to know what the trouble is, Lou? I'll tell you. The difference between you and me is not that I'm any less afraid than you of its being found out; I'm just as afraid. It's that you let your conscience bully you about it, and I don't. You make it a matter of good or bad, wrong or right; you know, like children's Sunday school lessons: going to heaven or going to hell. With me it's just something that happened, and there's no more to be said. You keep wishing you could go back and have it over again, so that you wouldn't have done it. That's where the trouble comes in. It's that your own conscience is nagging you. That's what's ailing you."
She saw that she'd shocked him. She shrugged a little, and turned away. She took up a muslin petticoat that lay in wait folded over the side of the bed, flung it out so that its folds opened circularly, stepped into it, and fastened it about her waist. The grotesque shortness of her attire disappeared, and her extremities were once more normally covered to the floor.
"Take my advice, and learn to look at it my way, Lou," she went on. "You'll find it a lot simpler. It's not something good, and it's not something bad; it's--" here she made him the concession of dropping her voice a trifle, "--just something you have to be careful about, that's all."
She took up a second petticoat, this one of taffeta bordered with lace, and donned that over the first.
He was appalled at the slow, frightening discovery he was in the process of making: which was that she had no moral sense at all.s She was, in a very actual meaning of the word, a complete savage.
"Shall we go for a little stroll ?" she suggested. "It's an ideal day for it."
He nodded, lips parted, unable to articulate.
She was now turning this way and that before the glass, holding up a succession of outer costumes at shoulder level to judge of their desirability. "Which shall I wear? The blue? The fawn? Or this plaid?" She made a little pouting grimace. "I've worn them all two or three times now apiece. People will begin to know them. Lou, fetch out that money box of yours before we go, that's a good boy. I really think it's time you were buying me a new dress."
No moral sense at all.
51
The discovery was catastrophically sudden, though it shouldn't have been. One moment, they were affluent, he could afford to give her anything she wanted. The next, they were destitute, they could scarcely meet the cost of the immediate evening's pleasure they had contemplated.
It shouldn't have been as unforeseen as all that, he had to admit to himself; shouldn't have taken them unaware like that. There had been no theft, save at his own hands; nothing like that. But there had been no replenishment either. A vanishing point was bound to be reached eventually. It had been imminent for some time, if he'd only taken the trouble to make inventory. But he hadn't; perhaps he'd been afraid to, afraid in his own mind of the too-exact knowledge that he would have derived from such a summing up: the certainty of termination. Afraid of the chill that would have been cast upon their feasting, the shadow that would have dimmed their wine. There was always tomorrow, tomorrow, to make reckoning. And tomorrow, there was always tomorrow still. And meanwhile the music swelled, and the waltz whirled ever faster, giving no pause for breath.
He'd delved in each time, in haste, in negligence, without counting what was over. So long as there was something left, that was all that mattered. Something that would take care of the next time. And now that next time was the last time, and there was no next time beyond.
They'd been about to go out for the evening, swirls of sachet fanning out behind her like an invisible white peacock's tail spread in flaunting gorgeousness, an electric tide of departure crackling about them, she stuffing frothy laced handkerchief within the collar of her gloves, he lingering behind a moment to pluck out gas jet after gas jet. She was sibilant in tangerine taffeta, flounced with bands of brown sealskin, orange willow plumes snaking like live tentacles upon her hat. She was already in the open doorway, thirsting to be gone, waiting a moment to allow him to overtake her and close the door after them, and grudging that moment's wait.
"Have you enough money with you, lovey ?" she asked companionably. And somehow made it sound entrancingly domestic; a wife being solicitous of her husband's welfare, much as if she'd said "Are you warmly enough dressed ?" or "Have you brought the latch key with you?"; though its ends were not domestic at all, but quite the reverse.
He consulted his money-fold.
"No, glad you reminded me," he said. "I'll have to get some more. I'll only be a moment, I won't keep you."
"I don't mind," she assented graciously. "When you enter late, everyone has a better chance to take in what you're wearing."
She was still there by the door, idly tapping the furled sticks of her small dress-fan, secured by silken loop about her wrist, upon the opposite recipient palm, when he returned from the bedroom where he had gone.
When she saw him coming, she dipped her knees a graceful trifle, caught higher the spreading bottom of her dress, and reached behind her to grasp the doorknob, prepared to go, this time offering to close the door for him instead of him for her.
Then she saw his gait had changed, was hesitant, expiring, not as it had been when he went briskly in.
"What is it? Something wrong?"
He was holding two single bank notes in his hand, half extending them before him, as though not knowing what to do with them.
"This is all that's left. This is all there is," he said stupidly.
"You mean it's missing, been taken ?"
"No, we've used it all. We must have, but I didn't know it. I could see it growing slimmer, but--I should have looked more closely. Each time I'd just reach in and-- There always seemed to be some over. I didn't know until this moment that--this was all it was--" He raised it helplessly, lowered it again.
He stood there without moving, looking at her now, not it, as if she could give him the answer he could not find for himself. She returned his look, but she said nothing. There was silence between them.
Her lips had parted, but in some sort of inward appraisal; they said no word. A little breath came through, in a soft, wordless "Oh" of understanding.
Her hand left the doorknob at last, and dropped down to its own level, against her side, with a little inert slap of frustration.
"What shall we do?" she said.
He didn't answer.
"Does that mean we--can't go now ?"
He looked at her, still without answering. Surveyed her entire person, from head to toe. Saw how beautifully she'd arrayed herself, how perfect in every detail the finished artistic picture she was offering for presentation. Or rather, had intended to offer, if given opportunity.
Suddenly he swerved, reached purposefully--and defiantly--for his hat.
"I'll ask for credit. We've spent enough by now, wherever it is we've gone; they should give us that."