Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/464

 with one man a long time. I don't even care if it isn't exciting as I thought it should be."

She went back to the living room and seeing Herbert lying on her bed a revulsion for him and herself came over her.

"Help me get him off the couch so I can go to sleep too," she called to Vida.

Together they pulled Herbert onto the floor and covered him with his overcoat.

Lucy tied a stocking around her eyes and Vida covered her with a blanket and went to her own bed, leaving the ashes, bottles, glasses, and congealed food to await the morning.

Tired as Vida was, sleep would not come.

"I'm cold," Herbert whimpered, trying to crawl in with Lucy.

She scolded him as if he were a child. "Herbert, you make me sick. I'm ashamed of you. I'm never going to take you anywhere again." She went to the bedroom door. "Are you asleep, Vida?"

"No."

"Come and help me."

Herbert was sprawled on the sofa. They pulled him to his feet, gave him a drink, thrust his coat and hat into his hands, and shoved him blubbering out the door.

"I'm disgusted with him. He makes me sick. I'm sick of myself even more," Lucy said, starting to cry.

Vida looked through the curtains to see whether he had made the stairs and saw the faint glow of the rising sun as Herbert weaved out of sight.

"Let's clean up and have breakfast and start a nice new year," she said.

In the first week of the new year Vida Bertrand returned home from Figente's at the hour day was dissolving into night. Though winter was scarcely two weeks old, in the lighted windows opposite there were signs of spring. Under aquamarine lights, white-coated furriers fingered with surgical delicacy pelts for summer wear. Milliners stretched yawning over floral heaps and jonquil- and hyacinth-colored Easter felts. A man at an enormous desk sat surrounded by women, all smoking and conferring about the next issue of a magazine.

What will they feature next month? Last month it was "Should Flappers Check Their Girdles At Proms?" Vida thought, switching 452