cartwheel of dull soft straw with a brown ribbon round the shallow crown. She had on a pink linen dress without much back. Her own was more than adequate. I could see Elsie Carter staring at it.
I moved away quickly. I didn’t want to be a party to what I could see was bound to happen. It was cowardice, of course, but I simply didn’t want to know how Sandra Gould was going to take Rosemary’s return. Because I like Rosemary and I like Jim, and I’ve never particularly cared about Sandra. But there was never any getting away from the fact that she was bright.
She came forward instantly now, like a lithe young panther about to confront a mouse. Elsie Carter did quake a bit.
“Hello, Grace! Hello, Meeses Cahtair!”
She shook a crimson-nailed forefinger at us. We both backed a little against a crate of spinach.
“You were talking about me! Oh, I know, I read the face. You are all thinking ‘Poor Sandra, she’ll lose Jeem now that Rosemary Bishop is coming back!’ ”
She tossed her head, clinging lightly to the edge of her hat with her fingers, and laughed happily.
“No, no! You are all wrong. Look at my Jeem. Does he look so sad?”
Dr. Potter, who was engaged in the business of buying a tin of prezels just behind Sandra, turned and gave me a sardonic half-smile as he caught my eye. We both followed Sandra’s finger pointing towards the street. Jim Gould, in an old gray sweat shirt and a pair of paint-spotted corduroy slacks, was out in the middle of the street with his brother-in-law Andy Thorp and a young chap from Wilmington refereeing a crap game for four minute colored boys. They all looked anything but sad.
“I suppose Jim knows they’re coming?” Dr. Potter said. He looked at Sandra. There was no smile on his face. I remembered—but, thank Heaven, I never admitted it to Colonel Primrose, not even innocently, as I might so easily have done, and certainly not wittingly when I discovered it was decidedly significant—that he didn’t smile, and that Sandra clapped her hands with such a delighted little gesture that the contrast was quite marked.
“Of course Jeem knows!” she cried. “I told heem myself—as soon as six, or”—she shrugged charmingly—“maybe thirteen, kind friends call me up thees morning to see eef I know!”
One thing about Sandra Gould is that the more charming she wants to be the rottener her English gets. She can lambast the butcher like a native.
“You are all ver’ ver’ weecked to poor Sandra,” she laughed mischievously, and added, suddenly very serious, her dark eyes flashing, “but I weel not let her ’ave my Jeemy. You weel see, Meeses Cahtair! In my country we do not let othair women take our husbands!”
Since no one that I ever met knew just what Sandra’s country was, there was no use arguing the point. I extricated myself from the spinach and moved away. Adam Potter followed me.
“Rather had us, what?” he remarked with a wry smile, as we came out together in the hot sun-baked street. “I only hope she’s right.”
“She probably is,” I said. “After all, people don’t go on being in love seven years. Not these days. Anyway, it’s none of our business. Jim’s as decent as they come and so’s Rosemary.”
Adam Potter looked at me a shade too steadily, I thought.
“Meaning Sandra isn’t?”
“Not at all. But I think that if anybody made a scene it wouldn’t be the other two.”
“It’s too bad the child died,” he said slowly.
“Not if—”
“Nobody ever knew how true any of that was, Mrs. Latham,” he interrupted sharply, knowing the village gossip even better than I. “Anyway, she’s a damned attractive woman.”
He turned on me with a sort of desiccated irascibility.
“My dear man, have I said anything to the contrary?”
He laughed and wiped his forehead with his handkerchief, pushing back his new wide-brimmed panama.
“No, of course not, Grace. Anyway, I wish they weren’t coming back. It’s bound to make trouble.”
“Not unless we all insist on it. They’ve never actually admitted their not coming back had anything to do with Rosemary and Jim.”
“I know,” he said. “It’s always been because Chapin was drowned here.”
We were standing on the steps of Mr. Toplady’s general store in the shade of what the telephone company had left of the big sycamore near the old slave block. Both of us were quite unconsciously watching Jim Gould, bareheaded, sun-bronzed and healthy, there in the middle of the street blocking the road.
“It’s been five years since they busted him out of the Navy,” Dr. Potter said after a moment. “Pretty hard medicine.—She’s not the same girl now, of course.”
“They didn’t bust him out,” I said. “He resigned.”
He shrugged his thin shoulders.
“Worse. He doesn’t get any retired pay.”
I followed his tired eyes up and across the sidewalk in front of the tea store. I remembered later how they’d lighted up a little, involuntarily. Sandra was coming out, barelegged in white sandals, moving lithe and sinuous, different, somehow, from the other women, so that you noticed the difference instantly.
“Why, Jeem! Andy!” she cried in mock consternation. “Lucy Lee, make them stop! Please, Lucy Lee!”
Lucy Lee is Andy Thorp’s wife and Jim Gould’s sister; hence, consequently, Sandra’s sister-in-law. More important at the moment, she is young Andy’s mother, and young Andy had just at that moment fallen off his tricycle at the curb and was yelling as if he had been killed. Lucy Lee was trying frantically to pick him up with one hand and hang onto the baby and her bundles with the other.
One of the nice things about both Sandra and Andy is that it wouldn’t ever occur to either of them to help her. Lilies of the field both of them, each in his own fashion; Sandra the tiger, and Andy a lily only in that he toiled very little and did nothing so practical as spinning. The trouble with Andy is that he was brought up with too much money and never counted on his father’s marrying again.
“Oh, do make them stop, Lucy Lee!” Sandra cried prettily. Lucy Lee threw her a look over her shoulder that was understandable, certainly, but that surprised me nevertheless.
Most of us thought of Lucy Lee’s face as pretty without much in it except tired lines, these days. Nothing like the sudden pent-up anger—almost hate—that I saw there now, before Lucy Lee remembered herself and smiled.
“Sorry, darling; you manage them,” she called, and went back into the little group of her own friends who’d come to her rescue.
I glanced at Dr. Potter, expecting him to say what everybody at April Harbor had been saying all summer—“I wonder how long Lucy Lee and Andy will last.” But he wasn’t paying any attention to Lucy Lee. He was still watching Sandra and Jim and Andy. Lucy Lee’s problem, I suppose, was the kind of thing he sees every day, without the glamour of the girl with the dusty pink cartwheel hat and dusky eyes. I was annoyed. I suppose it was sort of an instinctive defending of my own kind against something from the outside, although it was absurd of me to identify it with Rosemary Bishop rather than Lucy Lee and little Andy. At that, our instincts are wiser than we are.
“You know, Dr. Potter,” I said, “I think we’re all being pretty objectionable.”
He looked a little surprised, and flushed almost as if I’d caught him being personally indiscreet. Which is quite unthinkable.
“I mean, Jim doesn’t seem to be taking this very hard, and Rosemary’s been having a pretty exciting life in Washington and Europe all these years. I haven’t seen her, but I’ve seen pictures of her. She seems to be bearing up pretty