THE WOMAN WHO HAD TWO NAVELS
399
beget a monster of a child it could prove you were rather monstrous
yourself. I did what I pleased and was never punished. Can you
imagine what kind of a childhood it was?
If
it was a childhood
at all ..."
But once past the teens-"When you know how just one pimple
can be such a torment: so think what I went through"-she had
become indifferent. She had realized it was silly to squander thought
and tears on so trivial an oddity; she stopped worrying. "My one
big scare was when it became stylish to hare the midriff. Imagine!
They
would have been like pig's eyes peering out . .." But she had
taken
ill
and had stayed in bed until the style staled. She had fallen
in love with several boys who wanted to marry her but she had
always drawn back : she dreaded a husband's eyes on her secret.
"He might be horrified- I could never have stood that-or he
might say I had cheated." So she had put off and put off marry–
ing- until, suddenly, she was thirty, and she turned frantic.
"I could see myself getting older, painting myself thicker- a
regular hard-boiled veteran, up to my neck in clubs and charities–
having affairs with younger and ever younger men and sneaking oU
on 'combined-business-and-pleasure' trips abroad . . . Ugh! That
sort of free-lancing may be slick but it's not everybody's bowl of rice.
So I swept a most eligible man off his feet-and married him, this
morning."
It was quite a wedding, the way she described it. She assured
him it would be in all the papers-"And not on the society page
either. On the
front
page."
"Are your people important?" he asked.
"Father's one of the sacred elders in the government, Mother's
a famous beauty, and my husband has four or five generations of
sugar money behind him. But that's not why. About the front page,
I mean. 'Bride of the Season Marches Off the Scene Too Soon.'
'...
Running up the stairs in her charming Paris gown, the bride
then laughingly hurled the bouquet at her husband's face, to the
astonishment of a cosmopolitan crowd
...'"
"Did you?" he asked uneasily, and she laughed at him.
"No--of course not. We were having a very noisy breakfast at
my house afterwards, with all those cosmopolitan people, and he
