Free Complete Stories by Dorothy Parker, Colleen Bresse, Regina Barreca Page B

really seems to be an awfully good little——”
    Mr. Durant’s hand stopped sharply in its patting motions, as if the dog’s neck had become red-hot to his touch. He rose, and looked at his wife as at a stranger who had suddenly begun to behave wildly.
    “She?” he said. He maintained the look and repeated the word. “She?”
    Mrs. Durant’s hands jerked.
    “Well—” she began, as if about to plunge into a recital of extenuating circumstances. “Well—yes,” she concluded.
    The children and the dog looked nervously at Mr. Durant, feeling something was gone wrong. Charlotte whimpered wordlessly.
    “Quiet!” said her father, turning suddenly upon her. “I said it could stay, didn’t I? Did you ever know Father to break a promise?”
    Charlotte politely murmured, “No, Father,” but conviction was not hers. She was a philosophical child, though, and she decided to leave the whole issue to God, occasionally jogging Him up a bit with prayer.
    Mr. Durant frowned at his wife, and jerked his head backward. This indicated that he wished to have a few words with her, for adults only, in the privacy of the little room across the hall, known as “Father’s den.”
    He had directed the decoration of his den, had seen that it had been made a truly masculine room. Red paper covered its walls, up to the wooden rack on which were displayed ornamental steins, of domestic manufacture. Empty pipe-racks—Mr. Durant smoked cigars—were nailed against the red paper at frequent intervals. On one wall was an indifferent reproduction of a drawing of a young woman with wings like a vampire bat, and on another, a watercolored photograph of “Sep tember Morn,” the tints running a bit beyond the edges of the figure as if the artist’s emotions had rendered his hand unsteady. Over the table was carefully flung a tanned and fringed hide with the profile of an unknown Indian maiden painted on it, and the rocking-chair held a leather pillow bearing the picture, done by pyrography, of a girl in a fencing costume which set off her distressingly dated figure.
    Mr. Durant’s books were lined up behind the glass of the bookcase. They were all tall, thick books, brightly bound, and they justified his pride in their showing. They were mostly accounts of favorites of the French court, with a few volumes on odd personal habits of various monarchs, and the adventures of former Russian monks. Mrs. Durant, who never had time to get around to reading, regarded them with awe, and thought of her husband as one of the country’s leading bibliophiles. There were books, too, in the living-room, but those she had inherited or been given. She had arranged a few on the living-room table; they looked as if they had been placed there by the Gideons.
    Mr. Durant thought of himself as an indefatigable collector and an insatiable reader. But he was always disappointed in his books, after he had sent for them. They were never so good as the advertisements had led him to believe.
    Into his den Mr. Durant preceded his wife, and faced her, still frowning. His calm was not shattered, but it was punctured. Something annoying always had to go and come up. Wouldn’t you know?
    “Now you know perfectly well, Fan, we can’t have that dog around,” he told her. He used the low voice reserved for underwear and bathroom articles and kindred shady topics. There was all the kindness in his tones that one has for a backward child, but a Gibraltar-like firmness was behind it. “You must be crazy to even think we could for a minute. Why, I wouldn’t give a she-dog houseroom, not for any amount of money. It’s disgusting, that’s what it is.”
    “Well, but, Father—” began Mrs. Durant, her hands again going off into their convulsions.
    “Disgusting,” he repeated. “You have a female around, and you know what happens. All the males in the neighborhood will be running after her. First thing you know, she’d be having puppies—and the way they look after