Page:Dangerous Business (1927).pdf/84



At Tryston, where it was cool and misty on this Christmas eve, Lida Rountree, who never remembered her new surname, was entering her room. She had one of her own and Jay had another beside it; for the best rooms at Tryston were in suite.

They had the best, which were very expensive; but Jay, who was lying across his bed in the dusk, bothered little about the cost. He could not afford the rooms but neither could he afford marriage; and here he was married to a girl to whom dollars were merest details.

He did not know how many of his thousand dollars lingered in his pockets; he scarcely cared. Not only his finances—but all his affairs had fled so far beyond his reckonings.

Lida entered her room from the hall, flicked on her light and stood whistling, as she looked about. She did not notice him through the doorway and he watched her strip one glove and then the other to her finger-tips when, one after the other, she suddenly snapped them away. She removed her hat, stared at it and twirled it and skipped it, spinning, over the foot of her bed toward her pillows.

She whistled not lightly or cheerfully but with a sort of plaintive sharpness. Not with plaintiveness, exactly; for in plaintiveness is something of repining; and Lida