It makes me angry every time I think how I tried to make that dinner a
success. I canceled a theater engagement, and I took the Mercer girls in
the electric brougham father had given me for Christmas. Their chauffeur
had been gone for hours with their machine, and they had telephoned all
the police stations without success. They were afraid that there had
been an awful smash; they could easily have replaced Bartlett, as Lollie
said, but it takes so long to get new parts for those foreign cars.
Jim had a house well up-town, and it stood just enough apart from
the other houses to be entirely maddening later. It was a three-story
affair, with a basement kitchen and servants' dining room. Then, of
course, there were cellars, as we found out afterward. On the first
floor there was a large square hall, a formal reception room, behind it
a big living room that was also a library, then a den, and back of all
a Georgian dining room, with windows high above the ground. On the
top floor Jim had a studio, like every other one I ever saw--perhaps a
little mussier. Jim was really a grind at his painting, and there
were cigarette ashes and palette knives and buffalo rugs and shields
everywhere. It is strange, but when I think of that terrible house, I
always see the halls, enormous, covered with heavy rugs, and stairs that
would have taken six housemaids to keep in proper condition. I dream
about those stairs, stretching above me in a Jacob's ladder of shining
wood and Persian carpets, going up, up, clear to the roof.
The Dallas Browns walked; they lived in the next block. And they brought
with them a man named Harbison, that no one knew. Anne said he would
be great sport, because he was terribly serious, and had the most
exaggerated ideas of society, and loathed extravagance, and built
bridges or something. She had put away her cigarettes since he had been
with them--he and Dallas had been college friends--and the only chance
she had to smoke was when she was getting her hair done. And she had
singed off quite a lot--a burnt offering, she called it.
"My dear," she said over the telephone, when I invited her, "I want you
to know him. He'll be crazy about you. That type of man, big and deadly
earnest, always falls in love with your type of girl, the appealing
sort, you know. And he has been too busy, up to now, to know what love
is. But mind, don't hurt him; he's a dear boy. I'm half in love with him
myself, and Dallas trots around at his heels like a poodle."
But all Anne's geese are swans, so I thought little of the Harbison man
except to hope that he played respectable bridge, and wouldn't mark the
cards with a steel spring under his finger nail, as one of her "finds"
had done.