Page:Lost Ecstasy (1927).pdf/323

 The nurse went out defeated, and Bessie moved her chair closer to the chaise longue.

"How is she? How does she look?"

"I think she is a little thin."

"I daresay!" said Bessie dryly. "Hasn't she told you anything? Was it a fight, or another woman?"

Katherine flushed.

"Really, Bessie!" she said. "I can't ask her, and she has told me nothing. They have had this small ranch, and"

Bessie listened as she went on. She had never had any opinion of her sister-in-law's brains, and before her ten minutes were up she rose and picked up her hat.

"Where is she?"

"In her room, I imagine. She seems rather tired. She doesn't care to go out much."

In the hall Bessie stopped and made a few faces to relax the rigidity she felt about her mouth, and then she tapped at Kay's door. She had always been fond of Kay; there had been something of old Lucius in her. But if she had let this scatterbrained marriage of hers go on the rocks so soon, then perhaps there was something of her mother in her too. Some softening of fiber, some It was probably another woman.

She opened her attack abruptly, almost the moment she entered the room.

"So it didn't go?" she said, standing inside the door.

"Not as well as it might."

"And whose fault was it?"

Kay shrugged her shoulders.

"I don't know. Both, I suppose."

Nevertheless, in the end she told her story fully. One could do that with Bessie. And Bessie sat with her long cigarette holder between her long fingers with their pointed nails, and listened uncompromisingly. She never spoke until the end.

"Then you simply walked out and left him to that girl!"

"If he wants her he can have her."

"Oh, don't be such a little fool! Men always want some-