Read Hollywood for Free Online Page B

tease her.” Alice left them for the fireplace, where Eleanor stood, listening politely to Mr. Baruch. They were the only couple in the room in proper scale to each other. Like kindly giants, they stood before the flames and greeted Alice.
    Mrs. Bingham knew all. “Her father will run again, in 1920. He’ll be nominated, too. He’s made his peace with the regular Republicans.”
    “My Warren thinks the world of Colonel Roosevelt.” With a hunter’s eye, Mrs. Harding studied Alice in the distance, the quarry that had got away so far. “The Colonel needs Ohio, if he’s going to go anywhere at all, and my Warren can swing it for him.”
    “But surely Mr. Wilson will run again, and win again.” As Caroline spoke, she wondered if she ought to try to have another child; or was she too old? Menopause had not yet begun; even so, the
Tribune
’s Society Lady never ceased to warn its readers against having a child so late in life and so long after the first. Of course, there was no husband, but nowadays a respectable widow could simply take a long trip around the world and return with an adopted child, and an elaborate story of a family retainer, in France, at Saint-Cloud-le-Duc, dead in childbirth. Last wish for baby: America. Adoption.
What else could I do?
Every four years, coincidental with the presidential election, she thought of having a baby or going back to France for good or entering, at last, upon a furious love affair. Also, any mention of Theodore Roosevelt had the effect of turning her inward. Although she quite liked the former President despite—or because of?—his noisy absurdity, the thought of his absolutely requited self-love made her affections turn not toward him but herself. He aroused the competitive instinct in her. She could still start over. She had not lost her looks; she might still find … what?
    “I think I shall go to California,” she said, to the general astonishment of her companions and self. With that, she abandoned them for the father of her daughter, Burden Day, who had come to the Senate in 1915, the same year as Warren Harding. Before that he had been in the House of Representatives, where during his first—or was it second?—term he had deflowered her,for which she was in his debt. Otherwise, she might have been like Mlle. Souvestre, a vast untended garden, gone to seed.
    “Jim,” she murmured. He had just left the group around Alice and Kitty.
Kitty: The Unsuspecting Wife
. Caroline tended to think in headlines, capitals, italics, and bold
bold
Roman. She might no longer be much of a woman but she was truly a good and inky publisher. “Or should I call you Burden now?” With Jim’s elevation to the Senate, Kitty had decreed he be known as Burden Day, which had a presidential sound, she thought, though to Caroline the name suggested a spinsterish old gentleman, at Newport, Rhode Island, in exuberant thrall to needlepoint.
    “Call me anything. You look beautiful. What else?”
    “I do have something else in mind. The beauty’s only nature’s trap. I want another child.”
    “By me?” Burden’s smile was immaculate; but his voice had dropped to a whisper. Nearby, the Austrian ambassador spoke of peace to the secretary of the interior, who cared only for oil.
    “By you. Of course. I’m hardly wanton yet.”
    “I suppose it could be arranged.” He grinned; reminded her of the boy that he had been when they first met. “Funny,” he added, and she smiled broadly, aware that when anyone said “funny” it was fairly certain that all mirth had fled. “Kitty said almost the same thing to me last year.”
    “And you obliged.”
    “I obliged. She never really got over Jim Junior’s dying.”
    “Now?”
    “Happy. Again. How’s Emma?”
    “Our daughter wants to go to college. She is very brainy, not like me.”
    “Not like me, either.”
    “Come see her. She likes you.” Actually Emma was perfectly indifferent to her actual father, so much for the mystical