A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

Presently she got up to dance once more with her friend. A tender sobbing filtered through her consciousness.

“Do you recognize that?” she said. “It’s the Meditation from Thais.” And she added with a touch of bravado: “They’re playing it for me.”

“What a heavy title,” observed her partner. “You’d think they’d call it the Deep Thinkin’ Blues or something like that.”

As they passed Jones, baton in hand, he caught their eyes.

“Thanks,” smiled Mrs. Harry Werner cordially.

“Thank you,” he answered with a slight bow.

Every afternoon Zoe Werner stopped for luncheon at the Casa Madrid. The sands of the Albuquerque Playa knew her no more. Each day she drove nine miles to and fro for the cold asparagus tips and convent-like gloom of the Madrid. Is it reasonable to suppose she knew her own mind? Leaving her car, she entered and looked about her, accustoming her eyes to the cool shadowiness that pervaded the place. The floor was of pinkish sandstone and the patio partly open to the sky. There were plants and vines and Moorish water jars. Zoe Werner sat down at a nearby table at which Jones had been seated for some time past. They shook hands above the sapphire glassware.

“Wasn’t the water chilly this morning?” she remarked casually. “Have you had your dip yet?”

“She comes here every day at this time,” a Dillingham chorus girl confided to her chum. “He’s the orchestra leader at the Albuquerque Playa.”

“The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker,” observed the chum philosophically.

“I wish you wouldn’t insist on this place,” Jones was saying. “It’s frightfully expensive.”

“Don’t let that trouble your little heart.”

His eyes followed a mountain of cotton batting drifting painlessly over the sky in the direction of the West Indies. She had a flair for romance. She went over his face inch by inch like a surveyor.

After a while they renewed a discussion that had been going on between them for several days in succession.

“Then you want me to believe you are married?” she smiled.

“What makes you think I’m not?”

“Oh, it wouldn’t be right somehow,” she cried impatiently.

“Haven’t I a right to be married as well as the next fellow?” he said dryly.

She smiled into the corrugated blue glass. “You can’t convince me.”

“I can’t, eh?”

They laughed foolishly into each other’s faces.

“Not even if I were to tell you my wife’s right down here with me?”

Zoe Werner choked with mirth. “Absurd!” she cried. In the emotional intensity of the effort to convince her, he took one of her hands. Neither of them appeared to notice.

“She has charge of the perfumery counter at the Albuquerque.”

Her fire-red lips were ever so slightly ajar. She seemed puzzled. She drew her hand away. “I think I know who you mean. That baby-faced thing with the boy haircut.”

“She wears a ring around her throat, an alabaster ring I gave her.”

Zoe Werner made a little fist. “I’m going to ask her,” she cried rapturously.

He meanwhile was fumbling with the inside pocket of his coat and growing red in the face. She watched him with an expression that seemed to say “Yes, I know.”

“Try one of the side pockets,” she suggested, looking down shyly.

He put his hand in and felt a small envelope that had been left open.

Mrs. Harry Werner had sent down to say that she wanted to make a selection of toiletries. Sharlee was shown into her suite at ten the next day, carrying a tray loaded with flasks and vials strapped over her shoulders.

“Send her in here to me,” directed Mrs. Werner from an inner room. She was on the bed but not in it, her ankles crossed on the coverlet. She wore her hair in a Grecian knot at the back of her neck.

She looked Sharlee over. “What have you got there?” she asked indifferently.

“Coty, Caron, Bourjois—”

“I, ah, was speaking to your husband yesterday evening,” proceeded Mrs. Werner without stopping to listen.

Sharlee nodded obediently. “He leads the orchestra.”

“You both of you seem so well bred,” observed Mrs. Werner. “I can’t quite grasp the situation.”

“I came down here to be near him. Everyone has to make a living, you know.”

“Yes, we lunch together quite often,” mused Mrs. Werner dreamily.

“I know,” said Sharlee spiritedly. “Mr. Jones tells me everything.”

Mrs. Werner treated her to an indulgent smile. “Not quite everything, my dear.”

Sharlee looked at her as though a rattlesnake had just bitten her. She could hardly wait until she got away.

“Will that be all?”

“Yes, that will be all.”