Linda Lee, Incorporated: A Novel. Vance Louis Joseph

furs, planted elbows upon the table, cradled her chin upon the backs of engaged fingers, and peered about the room with quick, inquisitive, bird-like glances. "Ross would be furious."

      "Hope so. If he weren't, he ought to be spoken to about it. Or don't you think he has any right to object to your doing as you please?"

      "Oh, why worry about Ross's rights? He's just a husband."

      "And husbands haven't any rights worth considering. Quite so! All the same, sometimes they assert 'em."

      "I'd like to see Ross…" A laugh of lazy insolence rounded off Amelie's thought. "Besides, I'm not doing anything wrong…"

      "Not yet," Bellamy admitted equably. He nodded to their hovering waiter. "What kind of cocktail, Amelie? Everything else is ordered."

      "Thank goodness: I'm famished. A T-N-T, please."

      The waiter noted down this frightful prescription with entire equanimity, but lingered. "And monsieur – ?"

      "Nothing, thank you."

      "Nothing, monsieur?" Professional poise was sadly shattered for an instant. Why should one punish oneself with the cuisine of the Clique and reject the solitary compensation the establishment had to offer? Ejaculating "Nothing!" once more, in a tone of profound perturbation, the waiter retired.

      Bellamy tried to cover his annoyance with a laugh, but surprised a look of dark resentment in Amelie's eyes and opened his own. "Hello?"

      "Why did you do that? Simply to mortify me?"

      "Afraid I don't follow – "

      "Do you want the waiters to think you bring me here solely to satisfy my appetite for liquor? It isn't as if you were a plaster saint in that line yourself – not exactly."

      "Sorry, Amy. Make it a rule never to drink before evening."

      "Then why come here at all?"

      "Thought we'd agreed a little everyday discretion wouldn't do us any harm."

      "What are you afraid of? Your wife?"

      Bellamy answered only with a fatigued look. The cocktail was being served.

      "And the melon, monsieur – shall I bring it at once?"

      "Please."

      The tone was crisp if the word was civil. Amelie sipped her mixed poisons, mysterious malice informing the eyes that watched Bellamy over the rim of the glass.

      "Why take it out on the waiter if you're in a temper with me?"

      "I'm not, Amy, I – " Bellamy caught himself, and permitted impatience to find an outlet in a sound of polite expostulation: "Really!"

      Amelie put aside an empty glass. Refreshed and fortified, she brooded with sultry eyes while wedges of under-ripe casaba bedded in cracked ice were set before them.

      "You know, Bel," she observed in the dispassionate accents of the friend who wouldn't for worlds mention it, only it's for your own good – "you really ought to be more careful about your drinking. You barely escaped being pretty awful at times, last night."

      An indictment the more unkind because a cloudy memory refused to affirm or deny its justice. Bellamy began to repent his fidelity to the six o'clock rule.

      "Fancy your forgetting we'd agreed to meet here instead of at the Ritz. That ought to show you how lit you were."

      "Sorry – "

      "That's all very well: but suppose you hadn't had sense enough to call up this morning, suppose I had come here to meet you, just as we'd arranged, and had to go home after waiting around for hours like some shop-girl forgotten on a street corner – "

      "Poetic justice, if you ask me – something to offset some of the hours you've kept me fidgeting, wondering if you meant to show up at all."

      Injudiciously, Bellamy added a smile to the retort, by way of offsetting its justice.

      "So it amuses you to think of making an exhibition of me in a place like this!"

      "Oh, I don't know." Bellamy surveyed the restaurant without bias. "Not a bad little hole for people in our position."

      The melon, inedible and uneaten, was removed, soup in cups was substituted.

      "'People in our position'! I'm to understand, then, any 'little hole' is good enough for me, so long as I don't interfere with Lucinda's parties at the Ritz."

      Bellamy straightened his spine and put down his spoon. An understanding captain of waiters read his troubled eye and made casual occasion to draw the curtains across the front of the booth.

      "It is because Lucinda's lunching at the Ritz today, isn't it?"

      "My dear Amy," said Bellamy coolly: "I'm unaware of having done anything to provoke this, and if I've sinned unwittingly, I beg your pardon very truly. Won't you believe that, please, and let me off for today? I'm feeling rather rusty myself, my dear, and this is beginning to get on my nerves."

      At his first words the woman drew back, flushing, eyes stormy above a mouth whose gentle allure lost itself in a hardening line. Then swiftly reconsideration followed, visibly the selfish second thought took shape in the angry eyes and melted their ice to a mist of unshed tears beneath lids newly languorous. The petulant lips, too, refound their tremulous tenderness. Amelie's hand fell upon Bellamy's in a warm, convulsive clasp. She leaned across the corner of the table.

      "Kiss me, Bel – I'm so wretched!"

      He kissed her adequately but without any sort of emotion, thinking it strange, all the while her mouth clung to his, that he should so clearly know this to be good acting, no more than that, no less. Bellamy was not accustomed to see through women at so young a stage of intimacy; that came later, came surely; but never before had it come so soon. And in a little quake of dread he wondered if it were because he had grown old beyond his years, too aged in sentimental tippling to have retained the capacity for generous credulity of his younger years. Or was it that the woman's insincerity had so eaten out her heart, no technical perfection could lend persuasion to her playing, her caresses potency? Or that he had, since morning, fallen in love with his wife all over again and so truly that no rival passion could seem real?

      It was true, at least, that his thoughts were quick and warm with memories of Linda even while he was most engaged with the effort to do justice to Amelie's lips. And perceiving this to be so, self-contempt took hold of him like a sickness.

      They resumed their poses of nonchalant and sophisticated creatures amiably discussing an informal meal. But first the woman made effective use of a handkerchief.

      "Forgive me, dear," she murmured. "I know it was perfectly rotten of me, but I couldn't help it. I'm a bit overwrought, Bel, not too happy; being in love with you has made the way things are at home doubly hard to endure, you must know that; and then – of course" – she smiled nervously – "I'm jealous."

      He was silent, fiddling with a fork, avoiding her eye.

      "Of Lucinda – you understand."

      He said heavily: "Yes…"

      She waited an instant, and when he failed to say more began to see that she had overplayed her hand.

      "You do love me, don't you, Bel?"

      "Of course."

      "Then you must know how hard it is for me, you can't blame me for growing impatient."

      This time he looked up and met her gaze. "Impatient for what?"

      "Why, for what every woman expects when she's in love and the man whom she loves loves her; something definite to look forward to, I mean. We can't go on like this, of course."

      "No, not like this."

      "I'm not the kind of a woman for a hole-and-corner affair, Bel. If I were, you wouldn't be in love with me."

      He nodded intently: "What do you propose?"

      "I've been waiting for that to come from you, dear; but you never seem to live for anything but the moment."

      "I've got to know what's in your mind, Amy. Tell me frankly."

      "Well,