United States or Lesotho ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
She was thirty-four then; Kennicott about thirty-six. To her he was a superb, boyish, diverting creature; all the heroic qualities in a manly magnificent body. They had been helping the hostess to serve the Waldorf salad and coffee and gingerbread. They were in the kitchen, side by side on a bench, while the others ponderously supped in the room beyond. Kennicott was masculine and experimental.
The room was filled with a lumbering double bed and a cheap pine bureau. She stored the bed in the attic; replaced it by a cot which, with a denim cover, made a couch by day; put in a dressing-table, a rocker transformed by a cretonne cover; had Miles Bjornstam build book-shelves. Kennicott slowly understood that she meant to keep up her seclusion. In his queries, "Changing the whole room?"
Though they had all been certain that they longed for the privilege of attending committee meetings and rehearsals, the dramatic association as definitely formed consisted only of Kennicott, Carol, Guy Pollock, Vida Sherwin, Ella Stowbody, the Harry Haydocks, the Dave Dyers, Raymie Wutherspoon, Dr. Terry Gould, and four new candidates: flirtatious Rita Simons, Dr. and Mrs.
When Carol abruptly turned on the lights in the embattled living-room, half of the company were sitting back against the walls, where they had craftily remained throughout the engagement, but in the middle of the floor Kennicott was wrestling with Harry Haydock their collars torn off, their hair in their eyes; and the owlish Mr.
She lured Miles aside and worried: "They don't look at all well. What's the matter?" "Their stomachs are out of whack. I wanted to call in Doc Kennicott, but Bea thinks the doc doesn't like us she thinks maybe he's sore because you come down here. But I'm getting worried." "I'm going to call the doctor at once." She yearned over Olaf.
"But is Westlake fair? Isn't he sly?" "Sly is the word. He's a fox, that boy!" She saw Guy Pollock's grin in the mirror. She flushed. Kennicott, with his arms behind his head, was yawning: "Yump. He's smooth, too smooth. But I bet I make prett' near as much as Westlake and McGanum both together, though I've never wanted to grab more than my just share.
He gave it up for me. He stands by me, believing that every one loves me. He's the Rock of Ages in a storm of meanness that's driving me mad . . . it will drive me mad." All evening she sang Scotch ballads to Kennicott, and when she noticed that he was chewing an unlighted cigar she smiled maternally at his secret. She quieted the doubt without answering it.
It was salvation to push the heavy tables, to scrub them, to be exact in placing the sheet. Her head cleared; she was able to look calmly in at her husband and the farmwife while they undressed the wailing man, got him into a clean nightgown, and washed his arm. Kennicott came to lay out his instruments.
Not to have to apologize for her thoughts to the Jolly Seventeen, not to have to report to Kennicott at the end of the day all that she had done or might do, was a relief which made up for the office weariness. She felt that she was no longer one-half of a marriage but the whole of a human being.
There was an uneasy knot of only nine guests at the service in the unpainted Lutheran Church Carol, Kennicott, Guy Pollock, and the Champ Perrys, all brought by Carol; Bea's frightened rustic parents, her cousin Tina, and Pete, Miles's ex-partner in horse-trading, a surly, hairy man who had bought a black suit and come twelve hundred miles from Spokane for the event.
Word Of The Day