Dan would return to his immaculate, prosaic living-room where Lorraine would greet him and inform him all in the same breath that Lydia Hoyt was engaged and Lorraine would give a kitchen shower—and did Dan notice how the veranda posts sagged, hadn’t he better have a man come up and see about them?—oh, yes, there was something wrong with her car, well—she had let Owen drive it because he had deliveries to make ’way out in the country—beefsteak was three cents higher a pound than last week and two of the church deacons had resigned because they couldn’t have their way about the music.
After which Dan would slip away to unpack his bag and Lorraine to prepare his supper. There would be an abundant, well cooked meal on the prosaic table with its nightmares of hand painted peppers and salts and cut glass monstrosities, the water pitcher heavily banded with gilt. After eating his fill, Dan would depart to smoke in peace and wonder what Lorraine would think of Thurley’s new frocks and the baskets of flowers which forever adorned her rooms, of the bizarre friends and their weird ways—he would end, however, with the somewhat hopeless consolation that Lorraine had about as much imagination or capacity for artistic enjoyment as the old lady who, upon seeing mountains for the first time, merely said querulously,
“Dear me, if any one ever started to roll—”
For Lorraine would have probably remarked, after viewing Thurley’s apartment, “How in the world does she ever get the work done!” letting the panorama of joys and possibilities sweep on uncomprehended.
Therefore, Dan had decided, after very arduous sophistry, it was not wrong to see Thurley, to keep her in his bewildered heart as a sort of lovely idol, something set apart from the Corners and his house-and-garden life—something as different as the scarlet tanager or the jewelled dragon-fly is different from the barn-swallow or the field-daisy! Each has its own place.
But when spring began to hint of its appearance and Dan had been in New York over Easter, while the Corners gossiped about his absence, although Lorraine bravely occupied the front church pew and wore her new silk gown, Dan came home prepared to tell Lorraine that he would probably be away very often during the summer.