Page:So Big (1924).djvu/344

 Automatically, “You! Nonsense. You're just right.”

He was bored with these women who talked about their weight, figure, lines. He thought it in bad taste. Paula was always rigidly refraining from this or that. It made him uncomfortable to sit at the table facing her; eating his thorough meal while she nibbled fragile curls of Melba toast, a lettuce leaf, and half a sugarless grapefruit. It lessened his enjoyment of his own oysters, steak, coffee. He thought that she always eyed his food a little avidly, for all her expressed indifference to it. She was looking a little haggard, too.

“The theatre’s next door,” he said. “Just a step. We don’t have to leave here until after eight.”

“That's nice.” She had her cigarette with her coffee in a mellow sensuous atmosphere of enjoyment. He was talking about himself a good deal. He felt relaxed, at ease, happy.

“You know I’m an architect—at least, I was one. Perhaps that’s why I like to hang around your shop so. I get sort of homesick for the pencils and the drawing board—the whole thing.”

“Why did you give it up, then?”

“Nothing in it.”

“How do you mean—nothing in it?”

“No money. After the war nobody was building. Oh, I suppose if I’d hung on”

“And then you became a banker, h’m? Well, there ought to be money enough in a bank.”