up and goes more into detail about her happiness. I've never been able to figure out why, but women will tell each other things in a bedroom that they wouldn't dream of telling in any other room. Not that Vida went very far. Just a few little points. Like how Clyde's father had cast him off when they married and how she had felt herself that she was nothing but a bad woman taking advantage of this youth, she being a whole year older than he was; but Clyde had acted stunning in the matter, telling his father he had chosen the better part. Also it turned out this father hadn't cast him off from so much after all, because the old man went flat broke in Wall Street a couple of months later, perishing of heart failure right afterward, and about the only thing Clyde would of drawn from the estate anyway was an old-fashioned watch of his grandfather's with a chain made from his grandmother's hair when she was a bride.
I gathered they had been right up against it at this time, except for the two thousand dollars that had been left Vida by her Uncle Gideon in the savings bank at Fredonia. Clyde, when she drew this out, wanted they should go to Newport with it where they could lead a quiet life for a couple of months while he looked about for a suitable opening for himself. But Vida had been firm, even ugly, she said, on this point. She'd took the two thousand and started a boarding house that would be more like a home than a boarding house, though Clyde kept saying he'd never be able to endure seeing the woman bearing his name reduced to such ignoble straits.
Still he had swallowed his foolish pride and been really very nice about it after she got the business started. Now he was always telling her to be sure and set a good table. He said if you were going to do a thing, even if it was only keeping a boarding house, to do it well. That was his motto—do it well or don't do it at all! So she was buying the best cuts of meats and all fresh vegetables because of his strict ideas in this matter, and it didn't look as if they'd ever really make a fortune at it—to say nothing of there being more persons than I'd believe that had hard luck and got behind in their payments, and of course one couldn't be stern to the poor unfortunates.
I listened to this chatter till it seemed about time to ask what business Clyde had took up. It seemed that right at the moment he was disengaged. It further seemed that he had been disengaged at most other moments since he had stooped to this marriage with a daughter of the people. I mustn't think it was the poor boy's fault, though. He was willing at all times to accept a situation and sometimes would get so depressed that he'd actually look for work. Twice he had found it, but it proved to be something confining in an office where the hours were long and conditions far from satisfactory.
That's how she put it, with glowing eyes and flushed cheeks: "It proved to be mere dull routine work not in the least suited to darling Clyde's talents and the conditions were far from satisfactory. I had the hardest time prevailing on him to give the nasty old places up and wait patiently for a suitable opening. He was quite impatient with me when he consented—but, of course, he's only a boy of twenty-four, a whole year younger than I am. I tell him every day a suitable opening is bound to occur very soon. You see, he had so many grand friends, people of the right sort that are wealthy. I insist on his meeting them constantly. Just think; only last week he spent Saturday and Sunday at one of the biggest country houses on Long Island, and had such a good time. He's a prime favourite with a lot of people like that and they're always having him to dine or to the opera or to their balls and parties. I miss him horribly, of course, and the poor dear misses me, but I tell him it will surely lead to something. His old college chums all love him too—a boy makes so many valuable friends in college, don't you think? A lot of them try to put things in his way. I couldn't bear to have him accept a situation unworthy of him—I know it would kill him. Why, he wilts like a flower under the least depression."
Well, I set and listened to a long string of this—and not a word for me to say. What could any one of said? Wasn't it being told to me by the happiest woman I ever set eyes on? Yes, sir; I'd never believe how gentle natured the boy was. Why, that very morning, being worried about something that went wrong with breakfast, which she had to turn out at five A. M. to get started hadn't she clean forgot to change his studs to a fresh shirt? And, to make it worse, hadn't she laid out a wrong color of socks with his lavender tie? But had he been cross to her, as most men would of been? Not for one second! He'd simply joked her about it when she brought up his breakfast tray, just as he'd joked her to-night about her hands getting rough from the kitchen work. And so forth and so forth!
The poor thing had got so dead for sleep by this time that she was merely babbling. She'd probably of fallen over in her clothes if I hadn't been there. Anyway, I got her undressed and into bed. She said Clyde's goodnight song always rung in her ears till she slept. It didn't ring long this night. She was off before I got out the door. Darned if I hadn't been kind of embarrassed by her talk, knowing it would never do for me to bust in with anything bordering on the vicious, such as suggesting that if Clyde now and then went into the kitchen and helped Baby Girl with the dishes it would make a very attractive difference in him. I took another good look at his pictures in the parlour before I let myself out of the house. He still looked good—but hell!
I wrote Aunt Esther the same evening not to worry one minute about Vida's happiness, because I wished we could all be as happy as she was. All the same I took pains to go round to that boarding house a couple times more because it seemed like the girl's happiness might have a bum foundation. Darling Clyde was as merry and attentive as ever and Vida was still joyous. I guess she kept joyous at her work all day by looking forward to that golden moment after dinner when her boy would sing Good night, good night, beloved—he'd come to watch o'er her! How that song did light her face up!
She confided to me one of these times that the funny men are always making jokes about how much it costs a woman for clothes, and she wondered why they didn't make some of their old jokes about how much it costs for men's clothes too. She said I wouldn't believe how much they had to lay out on Clyde's clothes so he'd be sure to look right when a suitable opening occurred. I could take the item of shirts alone that had to be made to order and cost seven-fifty each, to say nothing of collars and ties and suits from what Clyde said was the only tailor in New York that could dress a gentleman so he looked like one. She said if these funny humourists could see what they spent on her clothes and what they had to spend on Clyde's, she bet they'd feel mighty cheap. She laughed like she had a bully joke on the poor things.
She was glad, too, for Clyde's sake that a suitable opening was just about to occur any moment, because the poor chap said himself it was a dog's life he was leading, with nothing much to do every day but go to the club and set round. And how thankful she'd ought to be that he never drank—the least bit of liquor made him ill—and so many young men of his class nowadays drank to excess.
No; nothing for me to say and nothing to do. Here was one happy love match. So I come home, making Vida promise to write often.
She did write about six times in the next three years. The chief fact standing out was that the right opening for Clyde hadn't opened yet—and he was getting more impatient every day. He always had something in view. But I judged he was far-sighted. And some way when he had got his rope over a job the hondoo wouldn't seem to render. He couldn't cinch anything. He was as full of blandishment as ever, though, and not a one of his staunch old friends had dropped him on account of his unfortunate marriage. He was a great diner-out and spent lots of week-ends, and just now was on a jolly houseboat in Florida for three months with an old college mate worth nine million dollars, and wasn't that nice! She could just see him keeping the whole party gay with his mandolin and his songs. The summer before that this same friend had let Clyde have an elegant motor car for his own use, and the foolish boy had actually took her out in it one Sunday, there being a pongee motor coat in the car that fit her beautifully so that none of his rich friends could have told she wasn't dressed as smartly as they was. He not only kept her out all afternoon, but would have took her to dinner some place only she had to get back to the boarding house because you couldn't trust these raw Swedes.
And there was one thing she was going to bring herself to confess to me, no matter if it did sound disloyal—a dreadful thing about Clyde. It
