Page:Jackson Gregory--joyous trouble maker.djvu/212



EATRICE CORLISS, accomplished business woman, had discovered with something of a start that life was not so simple a matter of dollars and cents as she had long imagined. On the other hand, it was a troublesomely complicated affair and brought times when one did not know just exactly how to take it. Life was something like that man Bill Steele! when it appeared merely frivolling it might have serious intent, when it posed at gravity it might be making mock of her.

The occasion had come for the first time in her life when she could not say clear thoughtedly: "I want this and I don't want that; I will have this and I won't have that!" She found herself flinging about restlessly in her own boudoir, amazing her maid until Beatrice remembered her and sent her away.

She had been deeply thoughtful, she would have said, as she and Joe Embry rode back from Camp Corliss to the ranch house. He, too, had appeared thoughtful; now she wondered if he had "got anywhere." She knew that she hadn't. … Then, when at last they had come to the house, Embry had spoken for the second time of his love for her. Or of his desire to marry her? Of course he meant the two to be inseparable conditions, and yet the impression he had made more 196