Sinclair Lewis - The Collected Works of Sinclair Lewis

"Yes, sir, he's got a great proposition there — believe me, he's got a great proposition — he's got one great little factory there, take it from me. He can turn out toothpicks to compete with Michigan. He's simply piling up the shekels — why say, he's got a house with eighteen rooms — every room done different."

Claire wondered whether Milt, when the sting and faith of romance were blunted, would engage in Great Propositions, and fight for the recognition of his — toothpicks. Would his creations be favorites in the best lunch rooms? Would he pile up shekels?

Then her fretting was lost in the excitement of approaching Seattle and their host — Claire's cousin, Eugene Gilson, an outrageously prosperous owner of shingle-mills. He came from an old Brooklyn Heights family. He had married Eva Gontz of Englewood. He liked music and wrote jokey little letters and knew the addresses of all the best New York shops. He was of Her Own People, and she was near now to the security of his friendship, the long journey done.

Lights thicker and thicker — a factory illuminated by arc-lamps, — the baggage — the porter — the eager trail of people in the aisle — climbing down to the platform — red caps — passing the puffing engine which had brought them in — the procession to the gate — faces behind a grill — Eugene Gilson and Eva waving — kisses, cries of "How was the trip?" and "Oh! Had won-derful drive!" — the huge station, and curious waiting passengers, Jap coolies in a gang, lumbermen in corks — the Gilsons' quiet car, and baggage stowed away by the chauffeur instead of by their own tired hands — streets strangely silent after the tumult of the train — Seattle and the sunset coast at last attained.

Claire had forgotten how many charming, most desirable things there were in the world. The Gilsons drove up Queen Anne Hill to a bay-fronting house on a breezy knob — a Georgian house of holly hedge, French windows, a terrace that suggested tea, and a great hall of mahogany and white enamel with the hint of roses somewhere, and a fire kindled in the paneled drawing-room to be seen beyond the hall. Warmth and softness and the Gilsons' confident affection wrapped her around; and in contented weariness she mounted to a bedroom of Bakst sketches, a four-poster, and a bedside table with a black and orange electric lamp and a collection of Arthur Symons' essays.

She sank by the bed, pitifully rubbed her cheek against the silk comforter that was primly awaiting her commands at the foot of the bed, and cried, "Oh, four-posters are necessary! I can't give them up! I won't! They —— No one has a right to ask me." She mentally stamped her foot. "I simply won't live in a shack and take in washing. It isn't worth it."

A bath, faintly scented, in a built-in tub in her own marble bathroom. A preposterously and delightfully enormous Turkish towel. One of Eva Gilson's foamy negligées. Slow exquisite dressing — not the scratchy hopping over ingrown dirt, among ingrown smells, of a filthy small-hotel bedroom, but luxurious wandering over rugs velvety to her bare feet. A languid inspection of the frivolous colors and curves in the drawings by Bakst and George Plank and Helen Dryden. A glance at the richness of the toilet-table, at the velvet curtains that shut out the common world.

Expanding to the comfort as an orchid to cloying tropic airs, she drew on her sheerest chemise, her most frivolous silk stockings. In a dreaming enervated joy she saw how smooth were her arms and legs; she sleepily resented the redness of her wrists and the callouses of the texture of corduroy that scored her palms from holding the steering wheel.

Yes, she was glad that she had made the experiment — but gladder that she was safely in from the long dust-whitened way, back in her own world of beauty; and she couldn't imagine ever trying it again. To think of clumping out into that world of deliberate and brawling crudeness ——

Of one Milt Daggett she didn't think at all.

Gorgeously sleepy — and gorgeously certain that by and by she would go, not to a stingy hotel bed, with hound-dog ribs to cut into her tired back, but to a feathery softness of slumber — she wavered down to the drawing-room, and on the davenport, by the fire, with Victoria chocolates by her elbow, and pillows behind her shoulders, she gossiped of her adventure, and asked for news of friends and kin back East.

Eugene and Eva Gilson asked with pyrotechnic merriness about the "funny people she must have met along the road." With a subdued, hidden unhappiness, Claire found that she could not mention Milt — that she was afraid her father would mention Milt — to these people who took it for granted that all persons who did not live in large houses and play good games of bridge were either "queer" or "common"; who believed that their West was desirable in proportion as it became like the East; and that they, though Westerners, were as superior to workmen with hard hands as was Brooklyn Heights itself.

Claire tried to wriggle out from under the thought of Milt while, with the Gilsons as the perfect audience, she improvised on the theme of wandering. With certain unintended exaggerations, and certain not quite accurate groupings of events, she described the farmers and cowpunchers, the incredible hotels and garages. Indeed they had become incredible to her own self. Obviously this silken girl couldn't possibly take seriously a Dlorus Kloh — or a young garage man who said "ain't."

Eva Gilson had been in Brooklyn within the month, and in a passion of remembrance of home, Claire cried, "Oh, do tell me about everybody."

"I had such a good time with Amy Dorrance," said Mrs. Gilson. "Of course Amy is a little dull, but she's such an awfully good sort and —— We did have the jolliest party one afternoon. We went to lunch at the Ritz, and a matinée, and we saw such an interesting man — Gene is frightfully jealous when I rave about him — I'm sure he was a violinist — simply an exquisite thing he was — I wanted to kiss him. Gene will now say, 'Why didn't you?'"

And Gene said, "Well, why didn't you?" and Claire laughed, and her toes felt warm and pink and good, and she was perfectly happy, and she murmured, "It would be good to hear a decent violinist again. Oh! What had George Worlicht been doing, when you were home?"

"Don't you think Georgie is wonderful?" fluttered Mrs. Gilson. "He makes me rue my thirty-six sad years. I think I'll adopt him. You know, he almost won the tennis cup at Long Branch."

Georgie had a little mustache and an income, just enough income to support the little mustache, and he sang inoffensively, and was always winning tennis cups — almost — and he always said, at least once at every party, "The basis of savoir faire is knowing how to be rude to the right people." Fire-enamored and gliding into a perfumed haze of exquisite drowsiness, Claire saw Georgie as heroic and wise. But the firelight got into her eyes, and her lids wouldn't stay open, and in her ears was a soft humming as of a million bees in a distant meadow golden-spangled — and Gene was helping her upstairs; sleepiness submerged her like bathing in sweet waters; she fumbled at buttons and hooks and stays, let things lie where they fell — and of all that luxury nothing was more pleasant than the knowledge that she did not have to take precautions against the rats, mice, cockroaches, and all their obscene little brothers which — on some far-off fantastic voyaging when she had been young and foolish — she seemed to remember having found in her own room. Then she was sinking into a bed like a tide of rainbow-colored foam, sinking deep, deep, deep ——

And it was morning, and she perceived that the purpose of morning light was to pick out surfaces of mahogany and orange velvet and glass, and that only an idiot would ever leave this place and go about begging dirty garage men to fill her car with stinking gasoline and oil.