THE MAN IN THE BROOKS SHIRT
285
like that to her. Certain evenings spent in bars with men she had
known for half an hour came back to her; she remembered the
beautiful frankness with which .the cards on each side were laid on
the table till love became a wonderful slow game of double soli–
taire and nothing that happened afterwards counted for anything
beside those first few hours of self-revelation. Now as she put
question after question she felt once more like a happy burglar
twirling the dial of a well-constructed safe, listening for the locks
to click and reveal the combination. When she asked him what the
monogram on his shirt stood for, unexpectedly the door flew open.
He told her his name, and went on irrelevantly, "I get these
shirts at Brooks Brothers. They'll put the monogram on if you
order the shirts custom-made. I always order a dozen at a time. I
get everything at Brooks Brothers except ties and shoes. Leonie
thinks it's stodgy of me."
Leonie was his wife. They had a daughter, little Angela, and
they lived in a fourteen-room house in the Gates Mills section of
Cleveland. He also had a son by another marriage, little Frank,
and Frank and Leonie got on wonderfully, he was glad to say, but
then nobody could deny that Leonie had a wonderful disposition.
Leonie was a home girl, quite different from Eleanor, who had
been his first wife and was now a decorator in New York. Leonie
loved her house and children. Of course, she was interested in
c~lture
too, particularly the theatre, and there were always a lot
of young men from the Cleveland Playhouse hanging around her;
hut then she was a Bryn Mawr girl, and you had to expect a woman
to have different interests from a man.
Leonie was a Book of the Month Club member and she also
subscribed to the two liberal weeklies. "She'll certainly be ex–
cited," the man said, grinning with pleasure, "when she hears I
met somebody from the
Liberal
on this trip. But she'll never be
able to understand why you wasted your time talking to poor
old Bill."
The girl smiled at him.
"I
like
to talk to you," she said, suppressing the fact that
nothing on earth would have induced her to talk to Leonie.
"I read an article in those magazines once in a while," he
continued dreamily. "Once in a while they have something good,
but on the whole they're too wishy-washy for me. Now that I've
