"I don't remember," I said at last. "Really, I don't believe--" Aunt
Selina smiled in a superior way.
"Now, don't you recall it?" she insisted. "I said: 'Baking soda in water
taken internally for cucumbers; baking soda and water externally, rubbed
on, when he gets that dreadful, itching strawberry rash.'"
I believe the dinner went on. Somebody asked Aunt Selina how much
over-charge she had paid in foreign hotels, and after that she was as
harmless as a dove.
Then half way through the dinner we heard a crash in Takahiro's
pantry, and when he did not appear again, Jim got up and went out to
investigate. He was gone quite a little while, and when he came back he
looked worried.
"Sick," he replied to our inquiring glances. "One of the maids will come
in. They have sent for a doctor."
Aunt Selina was for going out at once and "fixing him up," as she put
it, but Dallas gently interfered.
"I wouldn't, Miss Caruthers," he said, in the deferential manner he had
adopted toward her. "You don't know what it may be. He's been looking
spotty all evening."
"It might be scarlet fever," Max broke in cheerfully. "I say, scarlet
fever on a Mongolian--what color would he be, Jimmy? What do yellow and
red make? Green?"
"Orange," Jim said shortly. "I wish you people would remember that we
are trying to eat."
The fact was, however, that no one was really eating, except Mr.
Harbison who had given up trying to understand us, considering, no
doubt, our subdued excitement as our normal condition. Ages afterward
I learned that he thought my face almost tragic that night, and that he
supposed from the way I glared across the table, that I had quarreled
with my husband!
"I am afraid you are not well," he said at last, noticing my food
untouched on my plate. "We should not have come, any of us."
"I am perfectly well," I replied feverishly. "I am never ill. I--I ate a
late luncheon."
He glanced at me keenly. "Don't let them stay and play bridge tonight,"
he urged. "Miss Caruthers can be an excuse, can she not? And you are
really fagged. You look it."
"I think it is only ill humor," I said, looking directly at him. "I am
angry at myself. I have done something silly, and I hate to be silly."
Max would have said "Impossible," or something else trite. The Harbison
man looked at me with interested, serious eyes.
"Is it too late to undo it?" he asked.
And then and there I determined that he should never know the truth. He
could go back to South America and build bridges and make love to the
Spanish girls (or are they Spanish down there?) and think of me always
as a married woman, married to a dilettante artist, inclined to be
stout--the artist, not I--and with an Aunt Selina Caruthers who made
buttons and believed in the Cause. But never, NEVER should he think of
me as a silly little fool who pretended that she was the other man's
wife and had a lump in her throat because when a really nice man came
along, a man who knew something more than polo and motors, she had to
carry on the deception to keep his respect, and be sedate and
matronly, and see him change from perfect open admiration at first to a
hands-off-she-is-my-host's-wife attitude at last.