Complete Stories by Dorothy Parker, Colleen Bresse, Regina Barreca Read Free Book Online

close together, in illustration.
    Mrs. Ames shook her head sadly, and offered the cinnamon toast.
    “Imagine!” said Mrs. Marshall, refusing it though with a longing eye. “We were going to have dinner with them last Tuesday night, and then I got this letter from Grace from this little place up in Connecticut, saying she was going to be up there she didn’t know how long, and she thought, when she came back, she’d probably take just one big room with a kitchenette. Ernest was living down at the club, she said.”
    “But what did they do about their apartment?” Mrs. Ames’s voice was high with anxiety.
    “Why, it seems his sister took it, furnished and all—by the way, remind me, I must go and see her,” said Mrs. Marshall. “They wanted to move into town, anyway, and they were looking for a place.”
    “Doesn’t she feel terribly about it—his sister?” asked Mrs. Ames.
    “Oh—terribly.” Mrs. Marshall dismissed the word as inadequate. “My dear, think how everybody that knew them feels. Think how I feel. I don’t know when I’ve had a thing depress me more. If it had been anybody but the Weldons!”
    Mrs. Ames nodded.
    “That’s what I said,” she reported.
    “That’s what everybody says.” Mrs. Marshall quickly took away any undeserved credit. “To think of the Weldons separating! Why, I always used to say to Jim. ‘Well, there’s one happily married couple, anyway,’ I used to say, ‘so congenial, and with that nice apartment, and all.’ And then, right out of a clear sky, they go and separate. I simply can’t understand what on earth made them do it. It just seems too awful!”
    Again Mrs. Ames nodded, slowly and sadly.
    “Yes, it always seems too bad, a thing like that does,” she said. “It’s too bad.”

II
     
    Mrs. Ernest Weldon wandered about the orderly living-room, giving it some of those little feminine touches. She was not especially good as a touch-giver. The idea was pretty, and appealing to her. Before she was married, she had dreamed of herself as moving softly about her new dwelling, deftly moving a vase here or straightening a flower there, and thus transforming it from a house to a home. Even now, after seven years of marriage, she liked to picture herself in the gracious act.
    But, though she conscientiously made a try at it every night as soon as the rose-shaded lamps were lit, she was always a bit bewildered as to how one went about performing those tiny miracles that make all the difference in the world to a room. The living-room, it seemed to her, looked good enough as it was—as good as it would ever look, with that mantelpiece and the same old furniture. Delia, one of the most thoroughly feminine of creatures, had subjected it to a long series of emphatic touches earlier in the day, and none of her handiwork had since been disturbed. But the feat of making all the difference in the world, so Mrs. Weldon had always heard, was not a thing to be left to servants. Touch-giving was a wife’s job. And Mrs. Weldon was not one to shirk the business she had entered.
    With an almost pitiable air of uncertainty, she strayed over to the mantel, lifted a small Japanese vase, and stood with it in her hand, gazing helplessly around the room. The white-enameled bookcase caught her eye, and gratefully she crossed to it and set the vase upon it, carefully rearranging various ornaments to make room. To relieve the congestion, she took up a framed photograph of Mr. Weldon’s sister in evening gown and eye-glasses, again looked all about, and then set it timidly on the piano. She smoothed the piano-cover ingratiatingly, straightened the copies of “A Day in Venice,” “To a Wild Rose,” and Kreisler’s “Caprice Viennois,” which stood ever upon the rack, walked over to the tea-table and effected a change of places between the cream-jug and the sugar-bowl.
    Then she stepped back, and surveyed her innovations. It was amazing how little difference they made to the