The Progress of Love

he could wipe that up before she got home. He walked around and around in the pale bright living room, tamping down chunks of information, feeling lordly. Everything in the room got bits of whatever he was learning attached to it. There was a dark picture of a dead king and some stately ladies that he would always look at when he was memorizing poetry. The ladies reminded him in a strange way of Violet.
    He hadn’t known whether Violet would be home, because her afternoon off varied from week to week. But he heard her voice as he came up the stairs.
    “It’s me,” he called, and waited for her to come out of the kitchen and ask about his exam.
    Instead she called back to him, “Dane! Dane, I wasn’t expecting you! Come and have coffee with us!”
    She introduced him to the two people in the kitchen, a man and wife. The Tebbutts. The man was standing by the counter and the woman was sitting in the breakfast nook. Dane knew the man by sight. Wyck Tebbutt, who sold insurance. He was supposed to have been a professional baseball player, but that would have been a long time ago. He was a trim, small, courteous man, always rather nattily dressed, with a deft athlete’s modest confidence.
    Violet didn’t ask Dane anything about his exam, but went on fussing about getting the coffee ready. First she got out breakfast cups, then rejected them and got down her good china. She spread a cloth on the breakfast-nook table. There was a faint scorch mark on it from the iron.
    “Well, I’m mortified!” said Violet laughing.
    Wyck Tebbutt laughed, too. “So you should be, so you should be!” he said.
    Violet’s nervous laugh, and her ignoring him, displeased Dane considerably. She had been in town for several years now, and she had made several changes in herself, which he seemed to be just now noticing all together. Her hair was not done up in a roll anymore; it was short and curled. And its dark-brown color was not the same as it used to be. Now it had a rich, dull look, like chocolate fudge. Her lipstick was too heavy, too bright a red, and the grain of her skin had coarsened. Also, she had put on a lot of weight, especially around the hips. The harmony of her figure was spoiled—it almost looked as if she was wearing some kind of cage or contraption under her skirt.
    As soon as his coffee was poured, Wyck Tebbutt said that he would just take his cup down into the yard, because he wanted to see how those new rosebushes were getting on.
    “Oh, I think they’ve got some kind of a bug!” said Violet, as if the fact delighted her. “I’m afraid they have, Wyck!”
    All this time, the wife was talking, and she went right on, hardly noticing that her husband had left. She talked to Violet and even to Dane, but she was really just talking into the air. She talked about her appointments with the doctor, and the chiropractor. She said that she had a headache that was like red-hot irons being clamped on her temples. And she had another kind of shooting pain down the side of her neck that was like hundreds of needles being driven into her flesh. She wouldn’t allow a break; she was like a helpless little talking machine set up in a corner of the breakfast nook, her large sad eyes going blank as soon as they fixed on you.
    This was the sort of person, this was the sort of talk, that Violet was so good at imitating.
    And now she was deferring. She was listening, or pretending to listen, to this woman with an interest the woman didn’t even notice or need. Was it because the husband had walked out? Was Violet feeling a concern about his rudeness to his wife? She did keep glancing down into the back yard.
    “I just have to see what Wyck thinks about that bug,” shesaid, and she was off, down the back steps, at what seemed like a heavy and undignified trot.
    “All they are interested in is their money,” the wife said.
    Dane got up to get himself more coffee. He stood at the stove and lifted the coffeepot inquiringly while she talked.
    “I shouldn’t have drunk the amount I already have,” she said. “Ninety percent of my stomach is scar tissue.”
    Dane looked down at her husband and Violet, who were leaning together over the young rosebushes. No doubt they were talking about the roses, and bugs, and bug killer and blight. Nothing so crude as a touch would occur. Wyck, holding his coffee cup, delicately lifted one leaf, then another, with his foot. Violet’s look travelled down obediently to the leaf held against