On more than one occasion he
had peremptorily telegraphed for Lee to join him at some unexpected
place, for a party. Once, following a ball at the Grand Opera House, in
Paris, they had motored in a taxi-cab, with charming company, to
Calais. During that short stay in France John Partins had spent, flung
variously away, four hundred thousand dollars.
The industrious, the clerks, efficient women like Mrs. Wald, the
middle-aged lawyers in his office, were rewarded...by a pension. It was
all very strange, upside down: what rot that was about the infinite
capacity for taking pains! He supposed it wouldn't do to make this
public, the tritest maxims were safer for the majority; but it was too
bad; it spread the eternal hypocrisies of living. He asked Miss
Mathews:
"You're not thinking of getting married, are you? Because if you do
I'll have your young man deported; I simply won't let go of you."
"I don't see any signs of it, Mr. Randon," she replied, half serious
and half smiling; "my mother thinks it's awful, but I'm not in any
hurry. There are men I know, who might like me; they show me a very
good time; but somehow I am not anxious. I guess in a way it's the
other married girls I see: either they housework at home, and I
couldn't be bothered with that; or they are in an office and, somehow,
that seems wrong, too. I want so much," she admitted; "and with what
clothes cost now it's terrible.
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