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Ginny’s all grown up and everything, we don’t need a big tree. But I say, listen, that’s one thing I insist on, Freddy!”
    “We couldn’t afford one lots of times.”
    “Well you have a diller now, don’t you, honey? Milo really did a job on those pines in front of your place. If there was a committee in this town that awarded outdoor decoration prizes, why you know who’d win first prize!”
    Gloria decided to change her attack, to be direct. “Fern,” she said somewhat sharply, “I want to ask you something!”
    Fern turned around on the ladder’s step. “What?” “Fern, were you ever
hungry?”
    Fern’s face broke into a big smile. “Honey,” she said, “I’m starving right this deadly minute. Hand me up some cake, would you, Glo? I want to fix this peppermint stick.”
    It was always like that with Fern. Gloria got nowhere….
    • • •
    Now as Gloria sat in the dinette with her that morning in May, she noticed for the first time that Fern’s ears were pitifully gigantic, that her long face, which had never seemed
that
long, could not bear the burden of the youthful pony-tail style which Fern inflicted on it. Her hair itself was also different somehow. It suffered too obviously the abuse of once-a-week bad rinses, which Fern administered herself rather than go to a beauty parlor and admit it was dyed. Everything about Fern was different in Gloria Wealdon’s eyes.
    “Honestly!” Fern said again, and her voice no longer seemed husky and theatrical (it was raucous and “upstate”), “you’ve got the whole
country
on its ear! Right on its ear, honey! My gawd, I suppose I ought to be serving you coffee in there!” She waved a long, red-nailed hand toward the large dining room around the corner from the dinette.
    Gloria could remember when she had no other wish than to live like the Fultons, cushioned in luxurious comfort, wallowing in wall-to-wall, all-wool rugs, warming your brandy with palms cupped around crystal snifters after dinner, talking of trading in last year’s Lincoln for the new model.
    Now she thought of the simple, elegant modern furniture in her agent’s duplex, of the chic parquet floors which Pitts would not let even a scatter rug violate, of the three kinds of wine he invariably served at dinner, and of his small, low-hung Sunbeam Talbot in which they had raced back and forth to Greenwich for “bites to eat” on star-splashed spring nights.
    She said, “A lot of people are angry about my book, aren’t they?” glancing out of the window to the yard, where Freddy Fulton was fussing with the hedges. Beside him, following him around the way she followed him everywhere — just as Gloria had described it in her novel — was Virginia, the Fultons’ ugly teen-age daughter.
    “Freddy thinks you’ve made Ginny’s complex worse, that’s all,” Fern said, toying with her coffee spoon. “I’m sorry he was rude, but he’s so damnably over-protective! Glo, you hit the nail right on the head! It’s as though we were supposed to do penance or something because Ginny’s eyes are slightly crossed.”
    Slightly!
Glo winced. In the novel, Glo had made Ginny lisp instead.
    That morning when she had arrived at the Fultons’, neither Freddy nor Virginia had spoken.
    “And of course,” Fern Fulton said, “Freddy imagines himself as something of a Lothario. I suppose his ego was hurt because you showed how uxorious he is. That’s a divine word, darling — uxorious! I had to look it up in the dictionary.”
    • • •
    Gloria was dying to bring up Pitts’ name. She said: “My literary agent said only a woman could write a book in which
all
the wives had such fawning husbands. Pitts is — ”
    “He should get a look at the husbands around here,” Fern cut her off in the customary way. “You can have them, for my money!” Then she looked across at Glo and laughed, crushing her cigarette in the saucer, reaching over and pressing her large hand on Gloria’s wrist.