August gazed at her with the secret resentment more and more inspired by her sickness. At first he had been merely dogmatic--she must recover under the superlative advice and attention he was able to summon for her. Then his impatience had swung about toward all doctors--they were a pack of incompetent fools, medicine was nothing more than an organized swindle. They had tried baths, cures, innumerable infallible treatments--to no purpose. Finally he had given up all effort, all hope; he had given her up. And since then it had been difficult to mask his resentment.
The butler, a white jacket taking the place of the conventional somber black, poured four cocktails from a silver mixer and placed four dishes of shaved ice, lemon rosettes and minute pinkish clams before August Turnbull, Morice and his wife, and Miss Beggs, occupying in solitude a side of the table. Then he set at Mrs. Turnbull's hand a glass of milk thinned with limewater and an elaborate platter holding three small pieces of zwieback.
It was the particular character of her state that specially upset August Turnbull. He was continually affronted by the spectacle of Emmy seated before him sipping her diluted milk, breaking her dry bread, in the midst of the rich plenty he provided. Damn it, he admitted, it got on his nerves!
The sting of the cocktail whipped up his eagerness for the iced tender clams. His narrowed gaze rested on Emmy; she was actually seven years older than he, but from her appearance she might be a hundred, a million. There was nothing but her painfully slow movements to distinguish her from a mummy.
The plates were again removed and soup brought on, a clear steaming amber-green turtle, and with it crisp wheat rolls. Morice's wife gave a sigh of satisfaction at the latter.
"My," she said, "they're elegant! I'm sick and tired of war bread."
She was a pinkish young woman with regular features and abundant coppery hair. Marriage had brought her into the Turnbull family from the chorus of a famous New York roof beauty show. August had been at first displeased, then a certain complacency had possessed him--Morice, who was practically thirty years old, had no source of income other than that volunteered by his father, and it pleased the latter to keep them depending uncertainly on what he was willing to do. It insured just the attitude from Rosalie he most enjoyed, approved, in a youthful and not unhandsome woman. He liked her soft scented weight hanging on his arm and the perfumed kiss with which she greeted him in the morning.