So much to do! After toilet and breakfast, and rearranging the flowers and cushions, and deciding whether the sandalwood cigarette box or the Chinese enamel box would look better on the teakwood stool, there was always window-shopping, with surprises unheard of in Black Thread: English shooting-sticks which turned into one-legged stools, aquamarine necklaces, Parisian hats, cut-glass dishes for hors d'œuvres, onyx-topped evening sticks, Benedictine in unnatural-looking squat bottles, silver evening-slippers. She had engagements at the dressmaker's, at the shoemaker's, and in between there were always these won'erful motion pictures, which had not yet reached Black Thread. When she saw 'Queen Elizabeth', with Sarah Bernhardt, and Zukor's imperial settings, Effie May gasped with ecstasy over her brilliant new life.
If there was nothing else, she could always stretch herself on the chaise-longue, looking down at her new slippers and silk stockings while she curled her toes and waved her small feet, rejoicing at being secure from Julia's demands from the kitchen, and slowly, luxuriously gulping down candy--real dollar-a-pound store-candy! Back home, they had had home-made fudge, or thirty-cent candy from the drug-store, the best their father sold. Dollar-a-pound candy, in gold and scarlet boxes with silver ribbons, was something a beau brought you in awe from Bridgeport, once in a year. Here, in the Westward, she could have all she wanted, and she wanted a good deal, so that she began to worry about becoming too plump, as she nibbled sweets, cakes, fruit preserved in syrup, all afternoon long.
Myron was always attentive--at first. However busy, he telephoned up to her every hour; he sent flowers daily; he took her to lunch and dinner either in the brocade-panelled Georgian Room of the Westward, or in outside restaurants, where she was gratified to have head waiters bow and croak, 'Good evening, Mr. Weagle--good evening, ma'am,'
They went often to the theatre.
'We've got to see a lot of shows. We both of us need to broaden our minds, and lead a more you-might-say social life,' said Myron.
The social life consisted largely of Luciano Mora, Alec Monlux, and Ora; and to Effie May that seemed a very fine social life indeed, after the Lambkin parlour and Herbert whining about the school-board and Julia quarrelling with Willis. It was both mind-broadening and lovely fun to listen to Myron and Alec and Luciano discussing Colonial Reproductions and the presidential chances of Governor Woodrow Wilson and the objections to the gear-drive in mechanical potato-peelers, while beautifully they drank whisky not straight but with soda-water out of little bottles! Then Luciano returned to Naples, to manage one of his father's smaller hotels, and Myron and Effie missed him, daily. Without his laughter, their cocktail-hours seemed a little dull. Myron was ever busier and, however fond when he did telephone, less likely to telephone at all. Suddenly, when neither Genuine Lotus Bath Salts from an Old Eyptian Recipe, nor looking at tortoise-shell mirrors in shop windows, nor rustling through the box for chocolates with nigger-toe centres, was so novel, Effie May discovered that she had nothing to do, and that she was bored.
It had never occurred to Myron or to Effie that in an hotel suite, without even dish-wiping or feeding the chickens, and with no particular longing to study Imagism or Assyriology or the History of Endocrinology, she would not have enough to do. Being bored, she began to feel neglected--as she probably was, though the driven Myron could not think what to do about it. She felt the more neglected when Ora helpfully told her that she was. She took up French classes, dancing classes, daily exercise at a gymnasium where ex-pugilists anxiously tempered the labour to the fat lambs, and she had dress-fittings till Myron did begin to be alarmed about the bills. But she discovered in herself no talent for any of these arts save dressing. The jolly Effie May of Black Thread, with her three good frocks made by the village seamstress, became smart now, in tweed suits and Paris models, and just when she was falling into real discontent and whimpering at Myron that she could not endure the emptiness of her days, she met Mrs. Bertha Spinney.
Mrs. Spinney had red hair and alimony; she devoted half her life to preserving these treasures, and the rest to elderly young bachelors with exploratory fingers and imported Chartreuse. She was forty-five in the afternoon sunlight, twenty-five in the dark, her cheeks were powdered as with cake-flour, she laughed frequently, she told very good stories, and she clanked with heavy oxidized silver chains. Her suite was just down the hall from the Weagles' and Effie May had met her often in the elevator. She apparently knew all about Effie, and one day introduced herself and invited Effie in for a cocktail.
Immediately they were chums.
Myron did not like Bertha Spinney.
The blind, doting, efficient kindly Myron had never considered that in all of New York Effie had no woman friend, and indeed no friend of any kind save himself and Alec and perhaps Ora.
Effie May was happily occupied now. With Bertha Spinney she went window-shopping, and it was far more interesting, with Bertha to explain about diamonds that were blue and sapphires that were white, and how 'Couronne d'Amour' perfume, in a small black bottle shaped like a fig, cost ten dollars because it was so enticing that men were maddened by it. Effie secretly longed for a bottle, and saved up the ten dollars for it, but whenever she went back to the shop and looked into the window, she shamefacedly did not quite dare to go in and ask for it.
With Bertha she went to lunch, went to matinées, drove in the Park, ferreted out 'little dressmakers who make you real Paris models for just nothing, my dear!' and, at last, went to cocktail parties.
The era of penthouses and multiple cocktails and public kissing and universally saying 'Hello, darling', of gigolos posing as bond-salesmen and bond-salesmen posing as gigolos, and the other happy concomitants of Prohibition and the Great Peace had not yet come, but the Men About Town in 1911 did not do so badly on single cocktails. If they did not call the girls by their first names or manhandle them quite so quickly, when they got to it they meant it, and Effie May found herself the habituée of masculine flats that were floors of large old houses near Washington Square or Gramercy Park; found herself--giggling--the adored friend, suddenly, of a dozen Wall-Street men, or at least a-block-from-Wall-Street men, and occasionally even of genuine imported noblemen who, after five o'clock, when they had removed their alpaca office-coats, became great gentlemen, yet so simple of heart that they were willing to go to tea with any lovely Norse Goddess, provided she paid the bill.
Effie May discovered that she was charged and tingling with sex. She trembled, and felt as though fireworks had gone off inside her, when one of those public conveniences, the bachelors about town, stropped her damp arm or drew lingering finger-tips beneath her chin. She did respect Myron enough to remain what is technically known as a 'good woman', but she scampered back to him with such panting desire that he was overwhelmed with her ardour, her hot hands, her uncreased ivory skin, and while he seemed most strait-jacketed with filing-cards and kitchen-reports, he was most longing for her.
Probably he was too rigid of spirit ever to have aroused her vastly by himself; probably he owed a good deal to Bertha Spinney and the electrifying minor nobilities, but he never appreciated them.
Effie met a whole society of detached women dwelling in hotels, idle women, mostly living on alimony and displaying energy only when they dragged their former husbands into court. Many of them talked incessantly about their devoted care to their children, whom they got rid of by sending them away to school in winter and to camps in summer. Many of them were handsome, many of them were supporting lovers on the alimony from their curiously unwilling ex-husbands, and most of them were devoted to cocktails. In the Westward and other hotels within a dozen blocks, there were hundreds of these leeches, and Effie May was inducted into their splendidly blood-gorged society by Bertha Spinney.