Page:Temple Bailey--The Gay cockade.djvu/18

 Jimmie and his wife. He didn't agree with, me in the least about Elise. "She'll be the making of him. Such wives always are."

But I held that he would lose something,—that he would not be the same Jimmie.

Jimmie wrote plays and plays. In between he wrote pot-boiling books. The pot-boilers were needed, because none of his plays were accepted. He used to stop in our office and joke about it.

"If it wasn't for Elise's faith in me, Miss Standish, I should think myself a poor stick. Of course, I can make money enough with my books and short stuff to keep things going, but it isn't just money that either of us is after."

Except when Jimmie came into the office we saw very little of him. Elise gathered about her the men and women who would count in Jimmie's future. The week-ends in the still old house drew not a few famous folk who loathed the commonplaceness of convivial atmospheres. Elise had old-fashioned flowers in her garden, delectable food, a library of old books. It was a heavenly change for those who were tired of cocktail parties, bridge-madness, illicit love-making. I could never be quite ure whether Elise really loved dignified living for its own sake, or whether she was sufficiently discriminating to recognize the kind of bait which 12