This Side of Glory by Gwen Bristow Page A

showing a deposit to her credit of eight thousand dollars. She gasped, but he said, “Now you won’t pester me for a whole year, will you?”
    “Are you angry with me?” Eleanor asked repentantly.
    “My darling, no,” said Kester, “but you know I’d never remember to make a deposit every month and I’m not going to waste a lot of time being called names because I am the way I am. You’ve got such—what’s that new word they’re using in factories?—efficiency.”
    Eleanor kept house with the exactness she liked, balancing her account books every week and doing the best she could to prevent Mamie from feeding her husband and children out of the Ardeith kitchen. Mamie was a trial, but she was a cook in a thousand and knew her power. They had eleven servants, which Eleanor considered about five too many, but she yielded to Kester’s importunities and retained them, along with sundry black boys who kept turning up from the plantation ostensibly to ask if there wasn’t something the young miss wanted done and actually to get some cold biscuits from Mamie’s generous hands. Eleanor put these down under the heading of “Foolish but Unavoidable Expenses,” and let it go at that. As long as Kester adored her as he did she was willing to compromise with everything else.
    “You’re an astonishing girl,” Violet said to her. “Don’t give me that innocent look out of your eyes, either, as if you didn’t know you were married to the most consummate heartbreaker in the United States. Remember what Washington Irving said?”
    Eleanor shook her head.
    “It’s about a man, but reverse the sexes and it applies to you. ‘He who wins a thousand common hearts is therefore entitled to some renown, but he who keeps undisputed sway over the heart of a coquette—’ something about his being a real hero. My dear, how do you do it?”
    Eleanor laughed and said she didn’t know, but privately she was rapturous. That she should love Kester so passionately seemed to her to require no explanation; she did not know how any woman could help loving him. But that he should love her seemed a perpetually recurring miracle. She liked every evidence of it. Kester made frequent trips to New Orleans, sometimes with and sometimes without her, and brought back absurd and expensive presents—rhinestone combs for her hair, frilled camisoles, taffeta petticoats that made an enticing racket when she walked. At Christmas he gave her a watch to be worn on a long chain about her neck and tucked under her belt, with a card saying “I love you” in nine languages, the preparation of which had taken him a whole morning in the Tulane library.
    After the opening of the new year Eleanor discovered that she was going to have a baby. She recognized it with some dismay, for though she had assumed that she would have children she had not intended to have any till she had been married a year or two and was tired of her carefree life, and besides, she was dubious about Kester’s reaction to the responsibilities of fatherhood. Kester had said he liked children, but she suspected that he thought of babies as being like the curly angels on Christmas cards, and as the eldest of six Eleanor had been required to play nursemaid too often to have any such cherubic misconceptions.
    But when she told Kester, he was thrilled. He immediately told everybody he knew, with the artless joy of a little boy promised a bicycle. He went up to the attic and brought down the carved rosewood cradle where the infant Larnes had kicked and squalled for a hundred years, and set it up in the old nursery six months before it would be needed. Eleanor’s new acquaintances called with congratulations, bringing presents of silver thimbles and yards of muslin, which, as she couldn’t sew, she put away in a drawer, and ordered a layette from New Orleans. Altogether, in spite of her amused and sometimes annoyed protests she found herself relegated to the place of a Brave Little Woman,