All I ask is that they should give me a start.”
“Ask Myrtle,” said Tom, breaking into a short shout of laughter as
Mrs. Wilson entered with a tray. “She’ll give you a letter of
introduction, won’t you, Myrtle?”
“Do what?” she asked, startled.
“You’ll give McKee a letter of introduction to your husband, so he can
do some studies of him.” His lips moved silently for a moment as he
invented, “ ‘George B. Wilson at the Gasoline Pump,’ or something like
that.”
Catherine leaned close to me and whispered in my ear:
“Neither of them can stand the person they’re married to.”
“Can’t they?”
“Can’t stand them.” She looked at Myrtle and then at Tom. “What I say
is, why go on living with them if they can’t stand them? If I was them
I’d get a divorce and get married to each other right away.”
“Doesn’t she like Wilson either?”
The answer to this was unexpected. It came from Myrtle, who had
overheard the question, and it was violent and obscene.
“You see,” cried Catherine triumphantly. She lowered her voice again.
“It’s really his wife that’s keeping them apart. She’s a Catholic, and
they don’t believe in divorce.”
Daisy was not a Catholic, and I was a little shocked at the
elaborateness of the lie.
“When they do get married,” continued Catherine, “they’re going West
to live for a while until it blows over.”
“It’d be more discreet to go to Europe.”
“Oh, do you like Europe?” she exclaimed surprisingly. “I just got back
from Monte Carlo.”
“Really.”
“Just last year. I went over there with another girl.”
“Stay long?”
“No, we just went to Monte Carlo and back. We went by way of
Marseilles. We had over twelve hundred dollars when we started, but we
got gyped out of it all in two days in the private rooms. We had an
awful time getting back, I can tell you. God, how I hated that town!”
The late afternoon sky bloomed in the window for a moment like the
blue honey of the Mediterranean—then the shrill voice of Mrs. McKee
called me back into the room.
“I almost made a mistake, too,” she declared vigorously. “I almost
married a little kike who’d been after me for years. I knew he was

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