“Whenever I see a wrinkled scrawny old woman plastered with jewelry I can’t help thinking of a mess of garbage. The best of it’s been used and the rest cast off. You wouldn’t trim a plate of garbage with fresh parsley or capers or mushrooms. It would be sheer waste on waste.” She looked at Dina, whose face bore an expression of shock. “I tell David he should hire somebody to wear his presents for me, like a kind of clotheshorse.”

“Did you say that to him?”

“Yes. I don’t think he liked it, maybe I shouldn’t have said it. He scolded me. But then he laughed.”

To her own friends Louise would say, “David brings me the craziest extravagant presents, I can’t make him stop, he sees me through rose-colored glasses.… Dina dear, show Mrs. Ballinger the new fur piece.… There. Doesn’t she look lovely! I tell David he can imagine I’m wearing it, kind of by proxy.”

“And what does he say?” Mrs. Ballinger asked, with awful composure.

“Oh, he laughs.”

“I bet,” said Mrs. Ballinger, biting off the two words, with a look at Dina.

It was the growing opinion among Mrs. Husack’s friends of her own age that somebody ought to wise up Louise. No one cared to assume this delicate mission.

“Hard as nails, that girl,” they said. “But Jo says there’s absolutely nothing between her and old Dave. Jo as good as put it to him. Not in so many words, I don’t mean. But roundabout, and Dave told him confidentially that Bay and the girl were practically engaged, he said nothing could make him and Louise happier, Dina was like a daughter to them and had been ever since she came. Well, figure it out. I can’t.”

Sometimes the quietly cynical and observant Bayard Husack thought he, too, could not figure it out. Dina pursued him with the relentlessness of a prey-stalking tigress. Her little apartment was the convenient background for their occasional love-making, but Bay never had said to her, I love you. Once, in a particularly moody moment he had said to the girl, almost lightly, “You sleeping with my old man, too?”

She was honestly shocked. “Bay, how can you say a thing like that! You know I’m not. How could I!”

“No I don’t. I don’t know anything about you, really. How about all that junk he’s always loading you up with? That for free?”

“It takes a quiet one like you to be as vulgar as that. You know perfectly well your mother gives it to me. I don’t even want it.”

“Who selects it for him?”

“I do. He asks me to. I suppose I could choose ugly dowdy things, but I can’t, I have to choose things that seem to me to be beautiful, that’s the way I am.”

“Dad’s the virile type. I know it isn’t your moral sense or any schoolgirl stuff like that. I know you well enough for that, anyway.”

“Would you really like to know why? It’s because I want to marry you and I want you to want to marry me, and you wouldn’t under the circumstances you—well, under those circumstances.”