And so passed the tenth day of David’s illness, with the smile on Elizabeth’s face growing a trifle fixed as three days went by without the shabby car rattling to the door; with “The Valley” playing its second and final week before going into New York; and with Leslie Ward unconsciously taking up the shuttle Clare had dropped, and carrying the pattern one degree further toward completion.

XIV

Just how Leslie Ward had drifted into his innocuous affair with the star of “The Valley” he was not certain himself.  Innocuous it certainly was.  Afterwards, looking back, he was to wonder sometimes if it had not been precisely for the purpose it served.  But that was long months after.  Not until the pattern was completed and he was able to recognize his own work in it.

The truth was that he was not too happy at home.  Nina’s smart little house on the Ridgely Road had at first kept her busy.  She had spent unlimited time with decorators, had studied and rejected innumerable water-color sketches of interiors, had haunted auction rooms and bid recklessly on things she felt at the moment she could not do without, later on to have to wheedle Leslie into straightening her bank balance.  Thought, too, and considerable energy had gone into training and outfitting her servants, and still more into inducing them to wear the expensive uniforms and livery she provided.

But what she made, so successfully, was a house rather than a home.  There were times, indeed, when Leslie began to feel that it was not even a house, but a small hotel.  They almost never dined alone, and when they did Nina would explain that everybody was tied up.  Then, after dinner, restlessness would seize her, and she would want to run in to the theater, or to make a call.  If he refused, she nursed a grievance all evening.

And he did not like her friends.  Things came to a point where, when he knew one of the gay evenings was on, he would stay in town, playing billiards at his club, or occasionally wandering into a theater, where he stood or sat at the back of the house and watched the play with cynical, discontented eyes.

The casual meeting with Gregory and the introduction to his sister brought a new interest.  Perhaps the very novelty was what first attracted him, the oddity of feeling that he was on terms of friendship, for it amounted to that with surprising quickness, with a famous woman, whose face smiled out at him from his morning paper or, huge and shockingly colored, from the sheets on the bill boards.

He formed the habit of calling on her in the afternoons at her hotel, and he saw that she liked it.  It was often lonely, she explained.  He sent her flowers and cigarettes, and he found her poised and restful, and sometimes, when she was off guard, with the lines of old suffering in her face.