She
looked neither forward nor back, and all was well.
She even flirted a little, that being the fashion, and, having had enough
of business men, encouraged the devotions of Bascom Luning and Jimmie
Thorne. She saw them when they chose to call in the daytime, and regaled
the glowering Mortimer at the dinner table with scraps of their sapience.
Mortimer had resigned himself long since to the sacrifice of several of his
bourgeois ambitions, among them to be master in his own house; but not an
iota of his convictions. Although it would not have occurred to him to
distrust his wife if she had chosen to sit up all night with a man, he made
frozen comments upon the impropriety of a woman having men in the house
when her husband was not there, sitting out dances with men, taking long
tramps through Marin County with three men and no one for chaperon but
Alice Thorndyke and Janet Maynard--shocking flirts--whole Sundays--with
lunch heaven knew where, and himself, who hated tramping, not included.
But these grim remonstrances were met in so gay a spirit of badinage that
he felt ridiculous, particularly as no powers of badinage or of repartee
had been included in his own mental equipment; and he usually relapsed into
a polite and bored silence.
He never had had much to say at the dinner table when they were alone, and,
as time went on, his comments on the day were exhausted before the soup had
given place to the entree, and Alexina fell into the habit of bringing her
Italian text-book to the table--the study of Italian just then being the
rage in her set--and whatever interesting book she had on hand.
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