It was a very pretty scene when they said good night.  Vida pretended that Clyde’s voice was falling off from smoking too many cigarettes at this club.  “I wouldn’t mind you’re going there, but I just know you spend most of the time in the club’s horrid old smoking room!” She tells him this with a pout.  Smoking room of a club!  The knowing little minx!  And Clyde chided her right back in a merry fashion.  He lifted one of her hands and said his Baby Girl would have to take better care of them because the cunnun’ little handies was getting all rough.  Then they both laughed and went out for a long embrace in the hall.

Vida come back with a glowing countenance, and the boarders having dropped off to their rooms when the life of the party went to his club we had a nice chat.  All about Clyde.  She hoped I did like him, and I frankly said he was about the most taking young brat I’d ever been close to.  She explained how their union had been a dream; that during their entire married life of a year and a half he had never spoken one cross word to her.  She said I couldn’t imagine his goodness of heart nor his sunny disposition nor how much everyone admired him.  But the tired thing got so sleepy in ten minutes, even talking about her husband, that she couldn’t keep back the yawns, so I said I’d had a wonderful evening and would have to go now.

But up in the bedroom, while I’m putting my things on, she gets waked up and goes more into detail about her happiness.  I’ve never been able to figure out why, but women will tell each other things in a bedroom that they wouldn’t dream of telling in any other room.  Not that Vida went very far.  Just a few little points.  Like how Clyde’s father had cast him off when they married and how she had felt herself that she was nothing but a bad woman taking advantage of this youth, she being a whole year older than he was; but Clyde had acted stunning in the matter, telling his father he had chosen the better part.  Also it turned out this father hadn’t cast him off from so much after all, because the old man went flat broke in Wall Street a couple of months later, perishing of heart failure right afterward, and about the only thing Clyde would of drawn from the estate anyway was an old-fashioned watch of his grandfather’s with a chain made from his grandmother’s hair when she was a bride.

I gathered they had been right up against it at this time, except for the two thousand dollars that had been left Vida by her Uncle Gideon in the savings bank at Fredonia.  Clyde, when she drew this out, wanted they should go to Newport with it where they could lead a quiet life for a couple of months while he looked about for a suitable opening for himself.  But Vida had been firm, even ugly, she said, on this point.  She’d took the two thousand and started a boarding house that would be more like a home than a boarding house, though Clyde kept saying he’d never be able to endure seeing the woman bearing his name reduced to such ignoble straits.