Page:Lost Ecstasy (1927).pdf/71

 "So I do; fine, Clare."

"And I'm straight, Tom. You can't say that about all of them."

"Sure you are. Don't I know that? That's why I don't want anybody to see you hanging around here."

But when she was at last in the old Ford and on her way back home, she knew she had not touched him. Knew indeed that she had never touched him, that his light-hearted philandering had been just that and nothing more.

She had cried steadily all the way back.

That was almost a week ago. She had gone back home, to the one-story bungalow on the outskirts of the town. Her mother was sitting on the porch resting after her dishwashing.

"That you, Clare? I was getting worried about you."

"I was just moving around, hunting a breeze."

"Your supper's in the oven. It's pretty much dried out now."

"I had a chocolate ice-cream soda, mom," she lied. "I'm not hungry." And went into the house.

Alone in her room she had turned on the light and surveyed herself in the mirror. No wonder he had turned her down. She looked ugly, badly dressed, crude. And that girl out there, with a lady's maid—Nora was the first personal maid outside of the movies she had ever heard of—a lady's maid to work over her. No wonder Tom's head was turned. She had a vision of this girl she had never seen, lounging about on sofas in exotic négligées, bathing or being bathed—poor Nora!—in a perfumed bath, casting her siren's net over all and sundry, and especially over Tom McNair.

She had gone on as best she could.

"You're sure it's all wool?"

"You can ask Mr. Dicer. It's the very best grade. Mrs. Hutchinson just bought a skirt off that piece."

"Well, I don't know that that recommends it."

Measuring, cutting, wrapping up, and then long periods of idleness when the heat came in waves through the open door, and her mind wrestled with loneliness and despair. The Fair, with the Emporium closed in the afternoons and