He found out. Dorothy asked him to dine with her one night at a fashionable restaurant, and on this occasion she brought along her current sleeping companion, a young Cuban with patent-leather hair. George sat at the table between them. And while the Cuban gave his undivided attention to the food before him, Dorothy began to talk to George, and he learned to his chagrin that she had picked him out of all the world to be the victim of her only sacred passion.
“I love you, Jawge,” she leaned over and whispered loudly in her rather whiskified voice. “I love you—but mah love for you is pewer!” She looked at him with a soulful expression. “You, Jawge—I love you for your maind,” she rumbled on, “for your spirit! But Miguel! Miguel!”—here her eyes roved over the Cuban as he sat tucking the food away with both hands—“Miguel—I love him for his bawd-y! He has no maind, but he has a fa-ine bawd-y,” she whispered lustfully, “a fa-ine beautiful bawd-y—so slim—so boyish—so La-tin!”
She was silent for a moment, and when she went on it was in a tone of foreboding:
“I wantcha to come with us to-naight, Jawge!” she said abruptly. “I don’t know what is going to happen,” she said ominously, “and I wantcha nee-ah me.”
“But what is going to happen, Dorothy?”
“I don’t know,” she muttered. “I just don’t know. Anything might happen!...Why, last night I thought that he was gone! We had a fight and he walked out on me! These La-tins are so proud, so sen-sitive! He caught me looking at another man, and he got up and left me flat!...If he left me I don’t know what I’d do, Jawge,” she panted. “I think I’d die! I think I’d kill myself!”
Her eye rested broodingly upon her lover, who at this moment was bending forward with bared teeth towards the tines of his uplifted fork on which a large and toothsome morsel of broiled chicken was impaled. Feeling their eyes upon him, he looked up with his fork poised in mid-air, smiled with satisfaction, then seized the bit of chicken in his jaws, took a drink to wash it down, and wiped his moist lips with a napkin. After that he elegantly lifted one hand to shield his mouth, inserted a finger-nail between his teeth, detached a fragment of his victuals, and daintily ejected it upon the floor, while his lady’s fond eye doted on him. Then he picked up the fork again and resumed his delightful gastronomic labours.
“I shouldn’t worry about it, Dorothy,” George said to her. “I don’t think he’s going to leave you for some time.”
“I should die!” she muttered. “I really think that it would kill me!...Jawge, you’ve got to come with us to-naight! I just wantcha to be nee-ah me! I feel so safe—so secure—when you’re around! You’re so sawlid, Jawge—so comfawtin‘!” she said. “I wantcha to be theah to tawk to me—to hold mah hand and comfawt me—if anything should happen,” she said, at the same time putting her hand on his and squeezing it.
But George did not go with her that night, nor any night thereafter. This was the last he saw of Dorothy. But surely none can say that he was ever bitter.
Again, there was the rich and beautiful young widow whose husband had died just a short time before, and who mentioned this sad fact in the moving and poignantly understanding letter she wrote to George about his book. Naturally, he accepted her kind invitation to drop in for tea. And almost at once the lovely creature offered to make the supreme sacrifice, first beginning with an intimate conversation about poetry, then looking distressed and saying it was very hot in here and did he mind if she took off her dress, then taking it off, and everything else as well, until she stood there as God made her, then getting into bed and casting the mop of her flaming red hair about on the pillow, rolling her eyes in frenzied grief, and crying out in stricken tones: “0 Algernon! Algernon! Algernon!”—which was the name of her departed husband.
“0 Algernon!” she cried, rolling about in grief and shaking her great mop of flaming hair—“Algie, darling, I am doing it for you! Algie, come back to me! Algie, I love you so! My pain is more than I can bear! Algernon!—No, no, poor boy!” she cried, seizing George by the arm as he started to crawl out of bed, because, to tell the truth, he did not know whether she had gone mad or was playing some wicked joke on him. “Don’t go!” she whispered tenderly, clinging to his arm. “You just don’t understand! I want to be so good to you—but everything I do or think or feel is Algernon, Algernon, Algernon!”
She explained that her heart was buried in her husband’s grave, that she was really “a dead woman” (she had already told him she was a great reader of psychologies), and that the act of love was just an act of devotion to dear old Algie, an effort to be with him again and to be “a part of all this beauty.”