He saw that, to Vestal, his devotion to the Negroes would be half insanity and half naughtiness, if she knew. Why take on such a silly character? And two weeks can do an extensive healing, in a Northern magic of gray rocks and orange lichens and sweet pines and sliding red canoes and blade-blue distances across the tremendous lake. He bathed with her in shock-cold water and, for all his hobbling, they raced like children, and he came back to town cured of his frenzy.
He came back to it an energetic young banker—white.
Chapter 27
That Neil was going to be a bank-president, but with a salary ten times that of Mr. Prutt, was too obvious for Vestal to talk about it. What interested her was the house that would then dignify their position. Neil was amused by her ambition to buy half of The Hill from Berthold Eisenherz and build the perfect house that every woman wants.
Could he, Neil teased, interest her in a “modern type” house, all windows and plaster, such as he had seen when—oh, well, he’d seen one some place.
He could not! She would patronize nothing so cold and queer. She had decided on a stone Norman manor house, only with sleeping-porches, a pine-paneled Rumpus Room with a built-in bar, and a doll’s-house for Biddy which should have—or am I too crazy? Vestal wanted to know—a doll’s-bathroom with real running water!
“Is that important for her?” Neil asked.
“Nothing could be more important, because she’ll be a little girl only once, you know.”
They had gone so far toward the assemblage of this Norman dungeon as to have planned to buy a new gas-stove.
The war with Japan had ended, and while Vestal was properly glad that their friends would be coming home from the South Pacific, she confessed to an equal delight that now the manufacturers would turn from arms to unimaginable domestic treasures: plastic dressing-tables and crystal coffee-pots and automatic dish-washers. She was already thinking of the wardrobe, in fabrics still uninvented, which she would prepare for Biddy when she went to Bryn Mawr, a dozen years from now.
At breakfast she suggested to Neil, “I’ll come downtown today, and you buy me a lunch and we’ll look at the gas-stove that I’ve set my girlish heart on. It’s a jewel of a stove, a rose, an eagle, a Bedlington of a stove, a stone, a leaf, a door, and I love it more than I do virtue—at least, it’s more practical.”
When he saw it, the stove did possess most of the splendors that Vestal had advertised, and she gloated, “That’ll make even our present dump of a kitchen look like the manorhouse of our destiny.”
He sighed, “But you still do like our house, don’t you?”