Linda Lee, Incorporated: A Novel

"Why not, if you like her so much?"

"She's not at all the type you seem to find most attractive. Why is it, I've often wondered, the women you lose your head about are almost always a bit – well – !"

Bellamy flushed sullenly. It was one of his crosses that he seemed never to have the right answer ready for Lucinda when she took that line. After all, there is only one salvation for a man married to a woman cleverer than himself: to do no wrong.

"Oh, if you're going to rake up ancient history – !"

But Lucinda pursued pensively, as if she hadn't heard: "I presume you've got to run after that sort, Bel, because they don't know you as well as I do – can't."

Even a slow man may have wit enough not to try to answer the unanswerable. Bellamy got stiffly to his feet.

"I'll drop in at the Ritz if I can make it."

"Do, dear … And Bel!" Lucinda rose impulsively and ran to him. "I'm sorry, Bel, I was so catty just now. Only, you know, there are some things one can't help feeling keenly. Dear!"

She clung to him, lifting to his lips a face tempting beyond all telling. Insensibly his temper yielded, and catching her to him, he kissed her with a warmth that had long been missing in his caresses.

"Linda: you're a witch!"

"I wish I were … enough of a witch, at least, to make you realize nobody cares for you as I do, nor ever will. Bel: don't go yet. There's something I want to ask you…"

"Yes?" He held her close, smiling down magnanimously at that pretty, intent face. As long as she loved him so, couldn't do without him, all was well, he could do pretty much as he liked – within reasonable limits, of course, bounds dictated by ordinary discretion. "What's on the busy mind?"

"I've been wondering if we couldn't go away together somewhere this Winter." Lucinda divined hostility in the tensing of the arm round her waist. "We're not really happy here, dearest – "

"But you were in Europe all Summer."

"Not with you, except for a few weeks. You took me over but left me to come back to business affairs that could have got along perfectly without you. And while you were with me, what was different from our life here? Nothing but the geography of our environment. Meeting the same people, doing the same things, living in the self-same groove abroad as at home – that sort of thing's no good for us, Bel."

"What's wrong with the way we live?"

"Its desperate sameness wears on us till we turn for distraction to foolish things, things we wouldn't dream of doing if we weren't bored. Look through my calendar there; you'll find I'm booked up for weeks ahead, and week in and week out the same old round. And so with you. Consciously or unconsciously you resent it, dear, you're driven to look for something different, some excitement to lift you out of the deadly rut. As for me … Would you like it if I took a lover simply because I was bored silly, too?"

"Linda!"

"But don't you see that's what we're coming to, that is how it's bound to end with us if we go on this way, all the time drifting a little farther apart? Why can't we run away from it all for a while, you and I, forget it, and find ourselves again? Take me to Egypt, India, any place where we won't see the same people all the time and do the same things every day. I feel as if I'd lost you already – "

"What nonsense!"

"Oh, perhaps not altogether yet. But slowly and surely I am losing you. Bel: I want my husband and – he needs me. Give me a chance to find him again and prove to him I'm something better than – than a boutonnière to a man of fashion."

"Boutonnière?"

"A neglected wife, the finishing touch."

Bellamy laughed outright, and Lucinda's earnestness melted into an answering smile. "What a notion! How did you get it, Linda?"

"Thought it up all out of my own head, strange as it may appear. You see – this is the danger of it all – you make me think, dear. And if you keep that up, first thing you know I'll be all mental – and that would be too awful!"

Bel laughed again, more briefly, and slackened his embrace; and she understood from this that, if she had not actually lost, she had gained nothing.

"Perhaps you're right. At all events, it's worth thinking about."

"You will think it over, Bel – promise?"

"Word of honour. But now – late for an appointment – must run."

Against the better counsel of her instinct, Lucinda put all she had left unsaid into her parting kiss – and felt that his response was forced.

In chagrin she wandered to a window and stood gazing blankly out till recalled by a new voice: "Good morning, Mrs. Druce."

Lucinda wadded the handkerchief into her palm and turned to her secretary, an unruffled countenance.

"Good morning, Elena."

Elena Fiske was conscientiously unalluring in the livery affected by intellect in reduced circumstances. Thanks to a cultivated contempt for powder, her good features wore an honest polish. She walked with a stride and looked you in the eye. Erroneously she conceived her opinion of Lucinda to be privately entertained.

"If you're ready for me," she suggested with perfect poise.

"Yes, quite ready."

Elena consulted a sensible note-book. "I was to remind you to telephone Mrs. Rossiter Wade."

"Oh, yes."

Lucinda took up the telephone but only to find the wire already in use; that is to say, somebody in another part of the house was talking without having thought to disconnect the boudoir extension. Recognizing Bel's voice, she would have hung up at once had she not overheard a name.

"Lucky to catch you in, Amelie," Bellamy was saying in the blandishing accents she knew too well. "About our luncheon, you know – "

"See here, Bel: you're not going to put me off at the last minute!"

"Rather not! But for reasons which I confidently leave to your imagination, it might be better to make it any place but the Ritz. What do you say to the Clique? It's at least discreet – "

"But Bel!" the mocking voice of Amelie Severn put in – "we settled on the Clique instead of the Ritz last night, just before you went home. What's happened to the old memory?"

Bellamy was still stammering sheepishly when Lucinda cutoff.

IV

Frost in the air of that early Winter day lent its sunlight the cold brilliance of diamond-dust. The sky was turquoise glaze, more green than blue, incredibly hard, shining, high and resonant. Though the new year was well launched, snow had not yet fallen, no dismal sierras of mud, slush and rubbish disfigured the city streets and hindered their swift business. But on Fifth avenue, by that mid-morning hour, the crush of motor-cars had grown so dense that one could hardly hope to drive from the Plaza to Thirty-fourth street in less than thirty minutes.

Bellamy, nursing a mood blackly malcontent, fumed over every halt dictated by the winking semaphore lights of the traffic towers. He could have made far better time afoot, and would infinitely have preferred the exercise – indeed, felt need of it. But in his understanding it was essential that the car should set him down in front of the sedate pressed-brick structure on East Thirtieth street whose entrance was flanked by an ever-stainless plate of brass advertising in dignified black letters Offices of the Druce Estate – necessary for the planting of what he was pleased to term his "alibi." It made his mind easier to know he could prove by the chauffeur that he had "gone to business." What he did with himself after passing through those austere portals the chauffeur couldn't know, couldn't be expected to know, consequently couldn't tell.

It was true, Lucinda had never deigned to question a servant about his comings and goings, he had no reason to believe she would ever be so far forgetful of her dignity. Still, if one will flirt with fire, the first rule is to take out insurance.

Notwithstanding the numerous occasions when his own laches and errors of judgment had betrayed Bellamy, his life of a licensed philanderer (so he rated himself) remained one endless intrigue of evasion, a matted tangle of lies, equivocations, shifts and stratagems, to keep account of which was not only a matter of life and death with him but a task to tax the wits of any man. The wonder was less that feet which trod such treacherous ground were known to slip, than that they slipped so seldom.

Merely to admit the need for all this involution of ambiguity and double-dealing grievously affronted self-esteem. Deceit was strangely distasteful to this man who was forever floundering in a muck of it, a quagmire from whose grim suck his feet were never wholly free. In saner interludes, times of disillusion and clear inner vision such as this, he loathed it all, himself most of all. Naturally fastidious, he felt himself defiled, much as if he were constrained continually to dabble those well-manicured hands in a kennel. He would have given half of all he possessed to be free of this feeling of personal dishonor which was the fruit of self-indulgence. A quaint contradiction was to be read in the fact that he knew no way to satisfy his vanity but at the cost of giving his vanity offence.