Chapter XLII

The next morning Gloria went to see Mother Gregory.

Her mother-in-law was just leaving to go downtown on a shopping trip. In her black straw helmet topped with three plumes she looked like the pictures of the Black Prince.... And what a warrior she was, thought Gloria!

"I won't keep you a minute, Mother Gregory," Gloria said to her as they walked out toward the sidewalk. "I just want you to let me have Maggie for a week or so, to teach me to cook. Will you?"

Mother Gregory shrugged her shoulders. "If she'll go," she answered. "But I don't believe she will. Let's run in and ask her."

They turned back to the house. Maggie was on her knees scrubbing the kitchen floor. She sat back on her heels, as the two women entered.

"Maggie," Mother Gregory began timidly, for Maggie was the only human being in the world of whom she was afraid, "I wonder if you'll go over to Mr. Dick's house again for a few days. Mrs. Gregory wants you to teach her to cook..."

Maggie scowled. "Indeed I will not!" she announced flatly. "I went there once to teach her, and she wouldn't learn ... wouldn't even try to learn. She's had her chance. And depend upon it, ma'am, she doesn't want to learn to cook now. All she wants is some one to do her dirty work for her...."

Mother Gregory held up one of her large, gloved hands to stop the flow of Maggie's words as they came thick and fast.

"That will do," she said sternly. Then she turned to Gloria.

"I'll teach you to cook, my dear," she offered generously. "We'll start to-day if you like. Just wait until I run upstairs for a housedress..."

"But your shopping trip," Gloria reminded her.

"It can wait," Dick's mother answered easily, as she rustled upstairs.

Gloria wondered afterward why Mrs. Gregory had bothered to bring a housedress along with her. Certainly she didn't need it, for she didn't lift her hand to do a bit of work all day.

"We'll go to market first of all," she said to Gloria.

"But I always telephone the grocer," the girl objected.

Mother Gregory's lips tightened. "That's no reason why you should keep on doing it," she said firmly. "The only way to get fresh food is to go to the stores, yourself, and look around. To telephone is a lazy woman's way."

She showed Gloria how to pick out a young chicken, and how to test the tenderness of the asparagus, the freshness of the spinach.

She was kind and talkative, as they rolled homeward in her car. But when she stood in the hall of the house, and looked around her, all the kindness faded from her face.

"This place is a sight!" she exclaimed. "My stars! when was it cleaned last?"

"Yesterday," Gloria said in a low tone.

"You ought to be ashamed to admit it," Mother Gregory answered in her decided tones. "It doesn't look as if it's been touched for a month of Sundays.... Let's go upstairs and put on our working clothes and I'll show you a thing or two about cleaning!"

There began the first day of real work that Gloria had ever known.

Mother Gregory kept saying, "We'll dust this room now," or "Now, we'll scrub out the bath-tub." But what happened was that she did all of the directing, and Gloria did the actual work ... the scrubbing, the sweeping, the polishing.

By noon her back ached, and her head throbbed with weariness.

"We'll have something to eat now," Mother Gregory said comfortably when the twelve o'clock whistles blew in the distance. "A little toast and tea will do for me. I never eat any lunch to speak of."

Gloria made the toast and the tea, while Mother Gregory cut a bouquet of roses from the bushes at the back of the house.

"You must have let the tea boil," she said as she tasted the cup Gloria set up before her. "It's bitter."

Gloria's face showed no more expression than that of the Sphinx. "I'll make some more," she said.

Not to save her life would she have admitted to Mother Gregory that she had thought that you boiled tea just as you boiled coffee ... for seven minutes.

The afternoon was worse than the morning. Mother Gregory sat on the high kitchen stool and showed Gloria how to clean a chicken. She did not touch it herself.

"Most terrible job in the world," was the girl's comment when it was over. "Like a class in anatomy!"

But picking over the spinach was almost as bad. When it came to the asparagus, Gloria let the knife slip in her blistered hands, and cut her finger and her thumb.

"Thank goodness, it's done, anyway!" she said, when the last of the asparagus was in the colander.

"How about salad and dessert?" asked Mother Gregory.

"Do I have to have them?" Gloria asked pathetically. She was so tired and hot that it seemed to her she would have to lie down ... or she'd drop.

Mother Gregory raised her eyebrows.

"If you're going to do this home-making job at all, Gloria, you'd better do it right," she said. "We can make a salad and some chocolate custard in ten minutes!"

"We?" thought Gloria. "What you mean by 'we' is that you'll sit there resting your face and hands while I do all the work!"

She was furious with Mother Gregory.

As soon as the custard was in the oven Mother Gregory suggested that "they" set the table.

"I couldn't have done a better job myself," said Mother Gregory as she took the custard from the oven.

"I'll go out in the yard and cut some more roses," she added, briskly, "while you're putting on the dishes."

"Her idea of a busy day seems to be cutting roses and ordering me around like a slave!" said Gloria to herself as Dick's mother disappeared through the back door.

"Now, let's get out the hose and wash off the front porch," was Mother Gregory's next suggestion when she came into the house with her armful of roses.

Gloria gritted her teeth together. But she lifted all the chairs down from the front porch and went to work with the hose and an old broom.

Presently Mother Gregory came around the corner of the house from the backyard. She had put on her hat and street dress.

"Good-by, my dear," she said. "I guess I'll have to be on my way. You've done just fine all day!"

She kissed Gloria and patted her weary shoulders,

"When you want any more help you know where to come, my dear, don't you?" She beamed at Gloria. "Straight to me!"

"Yeah, any old day I'll come to you for help, again!" Gloria thought resentfully. "I can work myself to death without your help, thanks!"

She went into the house, as soon as Mother Gregory's neat little car had disappeared around the corner. She threw herself down on the davenport in the living-room, and fell asleep at once.

Dick did not see her at once when he came home at half past six.

He stood in the hall, and looked around him, with a sense of foreboding. The house was filled with the pungent smell of a thorough cleaning, mingled with the odor of roast chicken.

Gloria must have hired a new maid! Not in a hundred years could she have cleaned the house as it had been cleaned. And that tantalizing smell of baked chicken! ... Gloria couldn't actually have gone to the trouble of baking a chicken....

Just then, she came out of the living-room. Her hair hung dankly about her pale face. Her lips drooped. And the bungalow apron she wore was dirty and covered with grease spots.

"Who did all the heavy housework? ... Not you, I know," Dick said, unbelievingly.

But his eyes swept Gloria from her untidy head to the hem of her bedraggled apron. He had never seen her like this before....

She certainly looked as if she had been working!

"Who do you suppose did it?" she snapped at him. "The army of servants you've hired to help me? ... Of course I did it, and I'm all in."

Every bone in her body ached. She dragged herself wearily past Dick into the kitchen. "Dinner's ready," she threw over her shoulder as she went.

The meal was done to a turn. The chicken was richly brown, the vegetables tender, and the salad chilled and crisp.

With the first thrill of housewifely pride that she had ever known, Gloria set the dishes down on the spotless tablecloth.

Marveling, Dick sat down to eat.

"I hope everything's as good as it looks," he said doubtfully. Gloria sent him a look of fury.

"It is!" she said.

And so it was. As he ate, Dick's sense of wonder grew. Had his wife become an expert cook overnight?

But when Gloria brought in the dessert, the mystery was solved for him. "It was Mother, bless her!" he said. "No one in the world makes chocolate custard like that but her!"

"It was not your mother," Gloria said with honest indignation. "I made that custard all by myself! All your mother did was to sit out in the kitchen and give me orders...."

Dick nodded. "Sure, I knew she bossed the job," he said. "You couldn't cook a meal like that alone, on a bet! ... What's she doing? Giving you cooking lessons?"

Gloria grunted.

"She's been giving me orders, mostly," she answered. "She said she'd come over and help me out. But all she did was to cut a lot of your best roses and strew them all over the house! ... She's some kid. She ought to be a gang boss! She'd make a peach...."

"I wish you wouldn't speak about my mother in that way, Gloria," Dick interrupted. He looked annoyed.

"Oh, blah, I'll do as I please," the girl answered, bitterly. "I'm getting tired of being slammed all the time. It's time I began to pan a few people myself.... You treat me like a doormat, and expect me to like it!"

"If I've treated you like a doormat I'm sorry," Dick apologized. He got up and walked out onto the front porch.

That was just like Dick! Whenever he was getting the worst of an argument, he got up and walked away. He was simply maddening!

Well, this was one time when he wouldn't get away with it! She'd walk right out after him, and say what she had to say to him!

Suppose the neighbors did hear it...? They probably had a few family battles themselves, at times.

But just as Gloria opened the screen door to go out, Dick walked down the front steps and around the house to the back yard.

Gloria ran upstairs and put a touch of rouge on either cheek. Then she followed him out to the garage where he was tinkering with the car.

"Dick," she said in a quiet, even voice, "I can't go on living like this. For three days I've been doing my housework just as well as I know how to do it ... and I'm willing to go on with it, if you'll only treat me decently. Won't you please?"

Dick turned toward her. He had taken off his coat, and rolled up his sleeves. His hair was ruffled, and there was a smear of grease across his cheek. He looked boyish ... absurdly boyish.

Gloria took her handkerchief from her apron pocket, and rubbed the grease from his face. Her hand dropped to his shoulder and stayed there.

"Dick," she said, "I'm so unhappy...."

She looked up at him. In the dusk her eyes were black and luminous, her mouth like a dark flower. "I want you to kiss me, Dick," she murmured. "Let's be friends.... It's terrible, living at arm's length, this way...."

"'Two falcons in a snare,'" Dick quoted. He moved a step or two away from her.

"Now, just what do you mean by that?" Gloria asked sharply. She hated Dick to quote things that she didn't understand from the books he was forever reading.

He shrugged his shoulders. "It doesn't matter," he said. "But I know, myself, that we can't go on living this way. It's impossible. I see it, too."

Gloria drooped. She braced herself against the side of the garage door.

"Well, what are we going to do about it?" she asked. "Do you want me to leave you? Do you hate me as much as that, Dick?"

He did not answer at once. He took his old pipe from his pocket and filled it.

"It's like this, Gloria," he said finally. "I don't hate you, at all. But Wayburn ... he's there, between us, somehow. You see, I can't ever kid myself again that you care about me. I know that you'd be in New York with him now, if he'd wanted you to be there.... A man doesn't forget a thing like that. No one but a boob like me would ever have had you in his house again, on any terms...."

"But I didn't do anything wrong!" Gloria defended herself, "What are a few silly kisses?"

Dick sneered.

"Yes ... I know that's the way you look at it," he said, "but no decent woman would let any man but her husband kiss her, Gloria. She wouldn't soil herself that way."

Gloria tossed her head impatiently. "Oh, you're so old-fashioned," she answered. "Think of all the petting that goes on at wild parties. And it doesn't mean a thing."

"That makes it all the more rotten, then," Dick pointed out. "Love isn't a game or a toy. It's bigger than any of us...."

He broke off abruptly. And when he spoke again his voice was quite cold and matter-of-fact. "Come on, let's go into the house. The mosquitoes are beginning to bite out here." He stooped to scratch his ankle.

They went in. Silently Gloria cleared the table, piled the dishes on the sink, and put the clean milk bottles out on the back porch.

Then she went into the living-room to join Dick. But he didn't look up. He went on reading as if he were all alone in the house.... He was utterly unaware of Gloria.

"Well," she said after ten or fifteen minutes had crawled by. "You treat me just as if I were a piece of furniture or something."

Dick closed his book and laid it on the table. "Did you want to talk to me?" he asked.

"Yes," Gloria answered. Her words came with a rush. "I've been thinking over what you said about Stan Wayburn having come between you and me.... And yet you keep Miss Briggs working in your office when you know she's in love with you ... and that I want you to get rid of her!"

Dick gave a short laugh. He picked up his book and opened it.

"If every man, whose wife wanted him to, would fire his stenographer, half the girls in the country would be out of a job to-morrow morning," he said. "No, I'm not going to fire Miss Briggs. Why should I? ... She's a good worker. I'd have a hard time filling her place."

There was a flick of finality in his voice.

"Very well, you keep her," Gloria answered. "I should worry. I'm going home to my mother to-morrow, anyway."

Dick made no sign that he had heard her.

"You don't care if I go, do you?" she asked, hoping he'd say he did care.

"I want you to do whatever you think will make you happy," Dick said gravely. "You know you can stay here as long as you like. But if you'd rather live with your mother and father, I'll take care of you. I'll send you all the money I can spare, every week. So do as you please."

Gloria tried to smile ... a poor little smile that barely lifted the corners of her mouth. Her throat swelled, and her eyes ached with unshed tears.

"All right, old dear," she said, trying to make her voice light and careless. But a high note of agony ran through it.

Incredibly she went straight to sleep, her worn-out body throbbing in every nerve. And at dawn the next morning she awoke.

She sat up in bed and looked around her room ... the familiar room with its wide window-seat, its flowered cushions, and silver picture frames.

To-morrow morning she'd be waking up in the shabby little bedroom in her father's shabby little house. Shuddering, Gloria thought of it ... the brown spot on the ceiling where the rain had leaked through the roof, the blistered woodwork, the battered iron bed.

How she had always hated that little room that was too cold in the winter, too hot in the summer! And how utterly glad she had been to escape from it, when she had married Dick Gregory!

A tear slid down Gloria's cheek as she thought of all the mornings of her future ... the lonely awakenings in that little room.

She lay with closed eyes and heard Dick stirring in his room, whistling in his bath, singing "Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep," as he dressed.

Later the sound of his car leaving the yard. Then silence. She would not see him again, she knew....

The doorbell rang. Gloria slipped her naked feet into bedroom slippers, threw a kimono around her, and ran downstairs.

Through the net curtains on the front door, she could see May Seymour standing on the porch. What in the world did May want coming at that time of the morning?

"Hello, Gloria, how's every little thing with you?" she asked, as she came into the hall. Her face was white as paper under her black crêpe hat, and there were faint mauve marks under her eyes.

"Fine as silk," Gloria answered, borrowing the brave phrase that her father used when things were at their very worst. "And you ... How are you, May?"

May tried to answer. Then, suddenly, she collapsed upon a chair, buried her face in her hands, and burst into horrible, shaking sobs.

She opened her handbag and took from it a folded bit torn from a newspaper.

"Read that," she sobbed.

Gloria unfolded the little clipping, curiously.

"Mr. and Mrs. Rodney Millbrook announce the engagement of their daughter, Margot, to Mr. James Neale Carewe, formerly of Boston. The wedding will be an event of late October," it read.

"Jim Carewe engaged!" Gloria cried aloud. "Why, did you ever hear of such a thing! And who's the girl, for goodness' sake?"

May looked up at her with wet, red-rimmed eyes. "She's a little cousin of Myra Gail's," she said. "A young thing just graduated from school this month. She can't be more than twenty ... and Jim's thirty-six, if he's a minute! Talk about cradle robbing...."

Gloria shook her head slowly. "But, May," she said. "You never cared a snap of your fingers about Jim. I've heard you say so a hundred times. It was always Jim who was wild about you."

"I know it," May answered. "But Jim's like all men. He wants to be respectable. He'd never marry me in a million years since this ... this scandal about John's ... suicide."

She pressed her handkerchief hard against her lips for a moment. Then she went on bravely: "This girl can give Jim just what he wants. Respectability, a houseful of friends, youth ... everything clean and new and shining. Perhaps he still does care for me, but he's not going to marry a scandal! He's too selfish to do a thing like that! He thinks too much of himself."

She took off her black hat and tossed it down on the hall table.

"You haven't any coffee on the stove, have you?" she asked. "I haven't had any breakfast."

"I haven't had any, either," Gloria answered. "Come out into the kitchen. I won't promise to cook anything for you. But Dick left some coffee on the stove, and there's jelly and rolls."

She stopped and looked hard at May for a minute. "Well," she said. "I guess we're both out of luck, my dear. I'm leaving Dick this morning. We've agreed to disagree. And I'm going back home to my people."

They stood there looking at each other with empty eyes. Neither had a word to say.

It flashed through Gloria's mind that they were like moths dancing around a light. They had flown too close to danger and had had their wings singed and broken....

But Stanley Wayburn and Jim Carewe were safe enough! One married, the other engaged to be married! They had escaped. Men always did.

It was the woman who took all the slurs, the snubs, and the pain. The man went scot-free from one love affair to another....

"Gloria," May said suddenly. "Let's get out of this town! Let's go away where nobody knows us, and start over again..."

But Gloria shook her head. "No," she said. "I tried that once.... The time I went to New York. And I almost died from homesickness. I ... I wanted Dick."

May stared at her. "Well, you poor little fish, why are you leaving him, then?" she asked. "If you care anything about him?"

"It's Dick who wants me to go," Gloria answered. "He ... he's through with me."

"Oh, you're crazy," May answered. "You might tell that to some people, and get away with it! But I know Dick Gregory ... and he's in love with you, and always has been!"

After May had gone, Gloria thought over what she had said. Was it possible that Dick still loved her?

... No, May was wrong. Dick couldn't love her any more, or he wouldn't let her go this way, would he?

All morning as she made the beds and washed the dishes, Gloria listened tensely for the phone to ring.... There was just a bare chance that Dick would call her from the office to ask her not to go away from him.

... But no, Susan Briggs was at the office. And Dick was completely under her sway. He was probably not even thinking about his wife at home. His wife, packing her trunks to leave his house, forever!

Hadn't Dick said that Miss Briggs was the one person in the world who gave him sympathy and understanding? A man didn't talk that way about a woman unless he was in love with her, Gloria told herself dejectedly.

She locked her trunks, and presently the expressman came for them.

There was nothing more to do ... no excuse for staying. And still Gloria lingered in the house that had been the House of Dreams for her and Dick ...

House of Dreams? ... Heart-break House was more like it!

Gloria laid the key to the front door down on the hall table, where Dick would be sure to find it. She picked up her little handbag, and went out. The door closed behind her. It closed on a chapter of her life...