Often Martie and Teddy had their supper at Childs’, in the clean warm brightness of marble and nickel-plate.  Teddy knew their waitress and chattered eagerly over his rice and milk.  Martie had a sandwich and coffee, watching the shabby fingers that fumbled for five-cent tips, the anxious eyes studying the bill-of-fare, the pale little working-women who favoured a supper of butter cakes and lemon meringue pie after the hard day.

She would go home to find the breakfast dishes waiting, the beds unmade, the bathroom still steamed from Wallace’s ablutions.  Teddy tucked away for the night, she would dream over a half-sensed book.  Why make the bed she was so soon to get into?  Why wash the dishes now rather than wait until she was in her comfortable wrapper?  She went back to her old habit of nibbling candy as she read.

The jolly little Bohemian suppers she had foreseen never became a reality.  Wallace hated cheap food; he was done with little restaurants, he said.  More than that, among his friends there did not seem to be any of those simple, busy, gifted artists to whose acquaintance Martie had looked forward.  The more distinguished members of his company he hardly knew; the others were semi-successful men like himself, women too poor and too busy to waste time or money, or other women of a more or less recognized looseness of morals.  Martie detested them, their cologne, their boasting, their insinuations as to the personal lives of every actor or actress who might be mentioned.  They had no reserves, no respect for love or marriage or parenthood; they told stories entirely beyond her understanding, and went about eating, drinking, dressing, and dancing as if these things were all the business of life.

Wallace’s favourite hospitality was extended to six silent, overdressed, genial male friends, known as “the crowd.”  These he frequently asked to dinner on Sunday nights, a hard game of poker always following.  Martie did not play, but she liked to watch her husband’s hands, and during this winter he attributed his phenomenal good luck to her.  He never lost, and he always parted generously with such sums as he won.  He loved his luck; the envious comments of the other players delighted him; the good dinner, and the presence of his beautiful wife always put him in his best mood.  They called him “Three deuces Wallie,” and Martie’s remark that his weight was also “Two—­two—­two” passed for wit.

She took his winnings without shame.  It was to take them, indeed, that she endured the long, silent evening, with its incessant muttering and shuffling and slapping of cards.  The gas whined and rasped above their heads, the air grew close and heavy with smoke.  Ash-trays were loaded with the stumps and ashes of cigars; sticky beer glasses ringed the bare table.  But Martie stuck to her post.  At one o’clock it would all be over, and Wallace, carrying a glass of whisky-and-soda to his room, would be undressing between violent yawns and amused recollections.