d
fall asleep almost directly after dinner, her head back against her
husband's shoulder, roundly tired out after a day all cluttered up with
matching the blue upholstery of their bedroom with taffeta bed hangings.
Shopping for a strip of pantry linoleum that was just the desired slate
color. Calculating with electricians over the plugs for floor lamps.
Herself edging pantry shelves in cotton lace.

Latz liked her so, with her fragrantly coiffured head, scarcely gray,
back against his shoulder, and with his newspapers, Wall Street journals
and the comic weeklies which he liked to read, would sit an entire
evening thus, moving only when his joints rebelled, his pipe smoke
carefully directed away from her face.

Weeks and weeks of this, and already Louis Latz's trousers were a little
out of crease, and Mrs. Latz, after eight o'clock and under cover of a
very fluffy and very expensive negligee, would unhook her stays.

Sometimes friends came in for a game of small-stake poker, but after the
second month they countermanded the standing order for Saturday night
musical-comedy seats. So often they discovered it was pleasanter to
remain at home. Indeed, during these days of household adjustment, as
many as four evenings a week Mrs. Latz dozed there against her husband's
shoulder, until about ten, when he kissed her awake to forage with him
in the great white porcelain refrigerator and then to bed.

And Alma. Almost she tiptoed through these months. Not that her
scorching awareness of what must have lain low in Louis' mind ever
diminished. Sometimes, although still never by word, she could see the
displeasure mount in his face.

If she entered in on a tete-a-tete, as she did once, when by chance she
had sniffed the curative smell of spirits of camphor on the air of a
room through which her mother had passed, and came to drag her off that
night to share her own lace-covered-and-ivory bed.

Again, upon the occasion of an impulsively planned motor trip and
week-end to Long Beach, her intrusion had been so obvious.

"Want to join us, Alma?"

"Oh--yes--thank you, Louis."

"But I thought you and Leo were--"

"No, no. I'd rather go with you and mamma, Louis."

Even her mother had smiled rather strainedly. Louis' invitation,
politely uttered, had said so plainly, "Are we two never to be alone,
your mother and I?"

Oh, there was no doubt that Louis Latz was in love and with all the
delayed fervor of first youth.

There