Free Pretty Leslie by R. V. Cassill Page A

All right, it happened. But would a gentleman have gone and complained?”
    â€œHe was a rat ,” Leslie said. “Yes. I didn’t see that. Yes.” With love she leaned toward her fat friend. Almost forehead to forehead, the two ladies peered deep into each other’s eyes.
    Ben thought he had never seen such a reservoir of withheld pity as gleamed through the good-humored, cosmetic death mask of his wife’s most recent best friend. It pleased him to think that Leslie could pull nothing on that one.
    Dolores would not be bored with their party.
    It was probable that she had not been bored since—fifty-seven years ago—she discovered that the real prizes afforded by kindergarten were not to be given for pasting cotton snowmen on construction paper or making the longest snake out of plasticene. In this life the prize was given for personality and if you were female (she had discovered in kindergarten that she certainly was) then that was the kind of personality that all her natural intelligence would be devoted to composing.
    The engagement rings (and two wedding rings, one of them her mother’s) did not twinkle on her fingers for nothing. She had learned long ago—though somewhat less than fifty-seven years—that the female personality has to be constantly reshaped. She was old now, and she did not blink the fact, not for a minute. She knew, just a shade better than anyone who had seen her come in to the party, the kind of figure she presented to their eyes. Yes, you bet, the fat old fool, rouged and corseted and hung with jewels (real ones, Buster, look a little closer, a little closer.…) and clad in a print that might have abashed a nineteen-year-old show girl. Even her scent was calculated, right down to the fourth decimal point, to make her seem the stereotype of the ancient, foolish widow.
    She had tried to be a smart widow four years ago when Cy Calfert died in bed at their home in Hawaii. She had enrolled at the U as a freshman, intending to catch up on philosophy and literature and perhaps write a funny novel about the way baseball wives followed the team back in the twenties. She got out of the college trap just in time. If anything was going to bore her before she died, it was not going to be philosophy and literature and trying to live good times at second hand by putting them on paper.
    She had come back here because Sardis had been her home until Cy married her, thirty-eight years ago this month. She had no relatives here any more, thank God; her four sons and a daughter were scattered from Connecticut to California. She wanted to be here because she remembered things about the city. One of the nicest things in her life was that she had never really forgotten anything. She still remembered what a triumph her year in kindergarten had been. But remembering—and shopping a little, keeping up her house—wasn’t a full-time employment. One day she answered an ad in the paper. Then she was working at Bieman’s, learning the switchboard at her age and discovering all over again how fine it was to be a female personality.
    She liked the whole gang at work. She particularly liked Leslie Daniels for the good reason that everyone else did. She, Dolores, was out of the running, in a certain sense of that word. It did her good when the photographers and layout men and Bieman’s son-in-law, who was not a bad egg, considering his handicap, called her Brigitte and loafed around the switchboard to trade yarns with her. But of course she no longer had what Leslie offered to view, dashing in and out with her air of inspecting the peasants, lounging with the boys and girls in the drafting rooms, filling sweaters that she so often wore to work with unaffected (but not unconscious!) generosity. The girl was all pose, Dolores thought, and there was nothing wrong with posing. What was wrong was when there was no reserve of detachment to give purpose to the pose. A woman