MORSE was a large, fair
woman of the type that incites some
men when they use the word "blonde" to
click their tongues and wag their heads
roguishly. She prided herself upon her
small feet and suffered for her vanity, boxing
them in snub-toed, high-heeled slippers
of the shortest bearable size. The curious
things about her were her hands, strange
terminations to the flabby, white arms splattered
with pale tan spots—long, quivering
hands with deep and convex nails. She
should not have disfigured them with little
jewels.
She was not a woman given to recollections.
At her middle thirties, her old days
were a blurred and flickering sequence, an
imperfect film, dealing with the actions of
strangers.
In her twenties, after the deferred death
of a hazy widowed mother, she had been employed
as a model in a wholesale dress establishment—it
was still the day of the big
woman, and she was then prettily colored
and erect and high-breasted. Her job was
not onerous, and she met numbers of men
and spent numbers of evenings with them,
laughing at their jokes and telling them she
loved their neckties. Men liked her, and
she took it for granted that the liking of
many men was a desirable thing. Popularity
seemed to her to be worth all the work that
had to be put into its achievement. Men
liked you because you were fun, and when
they liked you they took you out, and there
you were. So, and successfully, she was
fun. She was a good sport. Men like a
good sport.
No other form of diversion, simpler or
more complicated, drew her attention. She
never pondered if she might not be better
occupied doing something else. Her ideas,
or, better, her acceptances, ran right along
with those of the other substantially built
blondes in whom she found her friends.
When she had been working in the dress
establishment some years she met Herbie
Morse. He was thin, quick, attractive, with
shifting lines about his shiny, brown eyes
and a habit of fiercely biting at the skin
around his finger nails. He drank largely;
she found that entertaining. Her habitual
greeting to him was an allusion to his state
of the previous night.
"Oh, what a peach you had," she used
to say, through her easy laugh. " I thought
I'd die, the way you kept asking the waiter
to dance with you."
She liked him immediately upon their
meeting. She was enormously amused at
his fast, slurred sentences, his interpolations
of apt phrases from vaudeville acts and
comic strips; she thrilled at the feel of his
lean arm tucked firm beneath the sleeve of
her coat; she wanted to touch the wet, flat
surface of his hair. He was as promptly
drawn to her. They were married six weeks
after they had met.
She was delighted at the idea of being a
bride; coquetted with it, played upon it.
Other offers of marriage she had had, and
not a few of them, but it happened that they
were all from stout, serious men who had
visited the dress establishment as buyers;
, men from Des Moines and Houston and
Chicago and, in her phrase, even funnier
places. There was always something immensely
comic to her in the thought of living
elsewhere than New York. She could not
regard as serious proposals that she share
a western residence.
She wanted to be married. She was Hearing
thirty now, and she did riot take the years
well. She spread and softened, and her
darkening hair turned her to inexpert dabblings
with peroxide. There were times
when she had little flashes of fear about her
job. And she had had a couple of thousand
evenings of being a good sport among her
male acquaintances. She had come to be
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more conscientious than spontaneous about
it.
Herbie earned enough, and they took a
little apartment far uptown. There was a
Mission-furnished dining room with a hanging
central light globed in liver-colored
glass; in the living-room were an "overstuffed
suite", a Boston fern and a reproduction
of the Henner Magdalene with the red
hair and the blue draperies; the bedroom was
in gray enamel and old rose, with Herbie's
photograph on Hazel's dressing table and
Hazel's likeness on Herbie's chest of drawers..
She cooked—and she was a good cook—
and marketed and chatted with the delivery
boys and the colored laundress. She loved
the flat, she loved- her life, she loved Herbie.
In the first months of their marriage, she
gave him all the passion she was ever to
know.
She had not realized how tired she was.
It was a delight, a new game, a holiday, to
give up being a good sport. If her head
ached or her arches throbbed, she complained
piteously, babyishly. If her mood was quiet,
she did not talk. If tears came to her eyes,
she let them fall.
She fell readHy into the habit of tears
during the first year of her marriage. Even
in her good sport days, she had been known
to weep lavishly and disinterestedly on occasion.
He r behavior at the theatre was a
standing joke. She could weep at anything
in a play—tiny garments, love both unrequited
and mutual,