Lenore G. Marshall
ECLIPSE
Two new men arrived at that discreet Southern hotel
where winter months crept through summer sunshine with scarcely
a mark to differentiate the days, for although in certain places time
moves so fast that only the end of an hour or event reveals its pas–
sage, here when Mrs. Herrick thought it must be five o'clock it was
always three. The new men were placed at a table in front of the
door and other guests had to semicircle and stare above it when they
crossed the dining room, pausing in their progress to mention to an
acquaintance perhaps the degree achieved by the porch thermometer
or, perhaps, the state of their health, or, perhaps, that there would
be an eclipse of the moon tonight. Mrs. Herrick was pleased about
the eclipse. She eavesdropped impersonally over her martini, her
chicken and her book and had been advanced, if inquisitively, an
initial step beyond bowing terms by some of the old-timers, the long–
timers. She inspected the new men, an odd pair of strays among
these gentlefolk. Dining by herself was beginning to seem less con–
spicuous to her: many of the tables for two were occupied by one
since the hotel's clientele, being elderly, was composed largely of
widows and widowers.
She turned from the newcomers to her neighbors. There was a
frail white-haired gentleman, probably still unused to solitude and
to taking care of himself, who rubbed painstakingly at his jacket
where a buttery crumb had spilled. There was a rotund dowager
bouncing indomitably as she passed like a played-out tennis ball, who
craned at the title of Mrs. Herrick's book. "Oh! That? You'll die
when you hear what
I'm
reading! Oh dear, what
is
its name?" There
were gratified convalescents steered by paid companions : when they
had come they could hardly hold cards in their hands. Occasionally
there were women friends vacationing together or resigned couples.
Mrs. Herrick, in her chosen role of outsider, wondered about them
