THE OTHER MARGARET
489
Still, she wanted to be told that she had made the drink just right.
Elwin said, "Fine. Just right," and Margaret tried not to show the
absurd pleasure she felt.
For this ritual of Margaret's there were, as Elwin guessed, several
motives. The honor of her home required that her father not make
his own highball in the pantry and bring it out to drink in his chair,
not after she had begun to take notice that in the homes of some of
her schoolmates, every evening and not only at dinner-parties, a ser–
vant brought in, quite as a matter of course, a large tray of drinking
·equipment. But Margart>t had other reasons than snobbishness–
Elwin thought that she needed to establish a "custom," not only for
now but for the future, against the time when she could say to her
children, "And every night before dinner it was the
custom
in our
family for me to make my father a drink." He supposed that this
ritual of the drink was Margaret's first traffic with the future. It
seemed to him that to know a thing like this about his daughter was
one of the products of what could be called wisdom and he thought
with irony but also with pleasure of his becoming a dim but neces–
sary figure in Margaret's story of the past.
"I bought a picture today," Elwin said.
Margaret cocked an eye at him, as if to say, "Are you on the
loose again?" She said, "What is it? Did you bring it home?"
"Oh, just a reproduction, a Rouault."
"Rouault?" She said. She shook her head decisively. "Don't know
him." It quite settled Rouault for the moment.
"Don't know him?"
"Never heard of him."
"Well, take a look at it-it's over there."
She untied the string and took off the paper and sat there on
the big hassock, her feet far out in front of her, holding the great
king at arm's length. It was to Elwin strange and funny, this confron–
tation of the black, calm, tragic king and this blonde child in her
sweater and skirt, in her moccasin shoes. She became abstracted and
withdrawn in her scrutiny of the picture. Then Elwin, seeing the
breadth and brightness of her brow, the steady intelligence of her
gaze, understood that there was really no comic disproportion. What
was funny was the equality. The young lieutenant had been quite
neutralized by the picture. Even Mark Jennings had been a little
diminished by it. But Margaret, with her grave, luminous brow,
was able to meet it head on. And not in agreement either.
"You don't like it?" Elwin said.
.
She looked from the picture to him and said, "I don't think so."
