"
And when Jane cried out, as they entered the drawing room, "Good
heavens, Rodney, what a house!" he answered: "It isn't ours, thank God!
We rented it for a year in a sort of honeymoon delirium, I guess. We
don't live up to it, of course. Nobody could, but the woman who built
it. But we do our damnedest."
The gaiety in his voice clouded a little as he said it, and his grin,
for a moment, had a rueful twist. But for a moment only. Then his
untempered delight in the possession of his old friends took him again
and, with the exception of one or two equally momentary cloud-shadows,
lasted all evening.
They talked--heavens how they talked! It was like the breaking up of a
log-jam. The two men would rush along, side by side, in perfect
agreement for a while, catching each other's half expressed ideas, and
hurling them forward, and then suddenly they'd meet, head on, in
collision over some fundamental difference of opinion, amid a prismatic
spray of epigram. Jane kept up a sort of obbligato to the show,
inserting provocative little witticisms here and there, sometimes as
Rodney's ally, sometimes as her husband's, and luring them, when she
could, into the quiet backwaters of metaphysics, where she was more than
a match for the two of them.
Pages:
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248
249
250
251
252
253
254
255
256
257
258
259
260
261