Page:Dangerous Business (1927).pdf/163

 "What a lot you must be planning to do with me!"

"It can't be much—at first, Lida," he said.

"You don't care!"

"I do. D'you suppose I'd not like to bring you money, tell you to do what you please, live where you please?"

"With you, Jay?"

"Of course with me."

She approached him and seized his hands with her tingling touch on his fingers. "D'you want me with you here? If you loved me, Jay, what'd I care about Chicago? Damn the smoke, damn the dull, slaving people here—if you love me! There'd be a kick in diggings with you on fifty a week! Shall we try it? . . . But you got to love me! You got to love me! Grab me! Like you had to! . . . God, I knew it. You're no good in this place. You belong here." She thrust back from him. "I'll put on my sleeved dress. You change to a clean collar and we'll go to dinner."

She slammed the door of her room, shutting him out, and he stood gazing after her, aware of the collapse of his response to her and his inability to re-arouse it. She assigned it to Chicago, to his submission, upon this return, to the dominion of made and sold things.

Lida's phone rang and he heard her answer. She was speaking, he suspected, to Mrs. Philip Metten, who would be following up her invitation to the opera, and he realized that consequences to be counted by hundreds of thousands of dollars, in the dominion of made and sold things, might hang upon the nature of Lida's response; upon whether or not she affronted Mrs. Philip Metten. But he did not interfere. Lida's voice reached him, not in artic-