does take dope, but he’s been awfully decent to me. Of course you’ve got to watch him. He’ll take you for a ride every chance he gets, so don’t ever let him suggest a straight game of blackjack. He’s just naturally crooked, and as long as you remember that, he’s really a grand guy. He’d just cheat his grandmother out of her last cent, but then he’d turn around and give somebody else his last cent.”
“I see,” I said—not seeing, really. “And . . . your friend Mr. Cromwell?”
Judy’s clear brow clouded. “He’s all right,” she said quietly.
She went abruptly to the cocktail bar and poured out a stiff jolt of scotch. In the mirror I could see her face, unhappy and bitter again. She shot the glass half-full of soda, raised it to her lips, and put it down again without touching it.
“I don’t know why I do that,” she said abruptly. “I don’t like it.”
I tried to poke my hat back into shape.
“It’s universally regarded as one of the least successful ways of solving emotional problems, Mrs. Bonner,” I said. I got up. “I’m sorry, Judy. I didn’t realize he was such a . . . a sore point. But I’d just thought, in my old-fashioned way, that if he’s to be a member of the family shortly, I’d rather like to know—if not who his great-grandfather’s father was—at least where you met him. But think nothing of it, darling.”
I took my bag off the table.
“Are you dining with me, or have you got a date? I can manage beautifully. I’ve got a thousand letters to write.”
“You’re coming to the River House with us,” she said.
And just as I got to my door she came quickly after me.
“I’m sorry, Grace!” she whispered contritely, rubbing her nose against my shoulder. If you bring children up in stables, I suppose, you’ve got to expect them to act rather like horses. “I’m such a pig . . . and I don’t mean to be . . . not really!”
“Pigs are quite sensible people,” I said. “You aren’t acting like a pig, darling. You’re just being silly. But let’s skip it. I don’t want to know anything you don’t want to tell me.”
She went back to the table and stood, opening and closing the silver cigarette box.
“I’ve known Dex quite a while,” she said, in a dull little voice. “Before I came to Reno.”
She went on, not very steadily, and without raising her head.
“I . . . I said I’d marry him. Before I . . . left home.”
“That’s swell, then,” I said.
I was far from meaning it, but I was definitely glad, nevertheless, that she hadn’t just picked him up along the Boulevard of Broken Dreams . . . forgetting, for a little moment, that it’s a road that stretches on to infinity, only touching Reno as it passes.
I opened my door. “Does one dress?”
She looked up and laughed, her face suddenly alive and bright again.
“Only if you think you can get your man better if you haven’t got much on. Kaye Gorman’ll be dressed. I’m keeping these on.”
4
I’d never realized until that night what a restricted and completely mousey life I’d led. And I never realized until I got home again how utterly blissful a quiet private meal can be. On the other hand, I never ate better food, or drank better wine, or heard more amusing—and shocking—songs, or saw more diverting and totally cockeyed people, than I did at Reno’s River House. It’s one of the so-called divorce dens, I imagine. It’s certainly a den, with its painted Moorish pillars, and lights so dim and pink that the most ageing customer looks rosy-cheeked and dewy-eyed.
Through all the extraordinary and tragic things that were lying in wait for me, and that broke with the suddenness of a Washoe Zephyr—sardonically so called by the early miners because it sprang up at the drop of a hat and was likely to level every building, church or saloon, that they managed to erect in that barren and bitter wilderness—the River House of Reno remained a haven. The five days following my arrival seem now the most harrowing I’ve ever spent. I would have left Reno, my hair turned white in a single night, if it hadn’t been that, ghastly and unbelievable as everything was, it was still, in spots, grotesquely and unbelievably funny. As—for instance—when my old friend Sergeant Buck got himself locked in the ancient plumed and flambeaued hearse out at the race track, or the early morning when my new friend Whitey ran amok in the Washoe Bar, threatening to kick the devil out of the big butter-and-sheep man who accused him of stacking the blackjack deck, which, as a matter of fact, he had done. Or—above all—the night at the Town House in First Street when the woman at the next table pointed to her drunk and enormously owlish companion completely absorbed in a Lobster Thermidor, and said proudly to her friends, “Do you know what he’s done?—He’s re-read Anthony Adverse!”
That first night, however, was not so amusing as it was just simply difficult. It began when Judy refused to wear a jacket, and then had to send Dex Cromwell back up to her room to get it, while she introduced me as her sister out for a divorce to an old dragon in a cowboy hat who wrote gossip for some Eastern paper.
“You can sue them for libel, dear, and buy yourself a new mink coat,” she explained airily.
That mood didn’t last. The three of us—Dex Cromwell having returned—were sitting at a round table in a corner, eating luscious strips of Persian melon sprinkled with lime juice and white Bacardi, when I saw the muscles of Judy’s throat contract sharply.
She put down her spoon and turned to Dex. “If your friend Kaye is dining with us,” she said, very quietly, “I’m going home.”
Dex looked over his shoulder, a curious little flicker livening in his dark eyes. I followed his glance. Kaye Gorman, in a black chiffon evening gown that was positively French eighteenth century from the waist up, clinging around her elegant figure and swirling like a ballet skirt from the knees to the floor, a fox cape over her arm, stood at the arched door of the dining room, in sharp relief against the brilliantly lighted gaming tables and curving mahogany bar outside. Her bleached blonde hair and scarlet lips, the diamond bracelets on her white arm, the diamond clip at her dress against her milky white bosom, the scene behind her, made her seem quite suddenly symbolic of the whole picture . . . in the past when it was part of the richest mining spot in the world, in the present when the values were the same but the pattern so different.
The man at her side, in cowboy clothes, might have been a miner in the old days . . . only then their positions would have been reversed; he would have had the money, she would have been the one on the make. I glanced at Judy. In her riding shirt open at the neck, with her sun-tanned skin and scarlet lips and high proud little head, she was the present only. The past had no part in her.
“I tell you, if she comes here, I’m going,” she repeated calmly. Only a person who knew the depths behind those moss-gray eyes could have heard the passion under her voice.
Dex Cromwell lifted her hand and gave it a quick playful kiss. She winced almost as if he had struck her.
“Oh, don’t be stupid, darling!” he said lightly. “Don’t let everybody see you’re jealous! What do you
