Mildred Pierce - James M. Cain [89]
In some elusive, quicksilver way that she couldn't get her finger on, Mildred felt the argument slipping away from her, and like Veda, she abandoned logic and began to scream: "You've set her against me! I don't care a bit for your fine talk—you've set her against me!"
Monty lit a cigarette, smoked sullenly a few moments without speaking. Then he looked up. "Ah! So this is why you came. Stupid of me not to have thought of it sooner."
"I came because I was invited."
"On a night like this?"
"It's as good a time as any other."
"What a nice little pal you turned out to be. . . . Funny—I had something to say, too."
He looked with a little self-pitying smile into the fire, evidently decided to keep his intentions to himself, then changed his mind. " . . . I was going to say you'd make a fine wife for somebody—if you didn't live in Glendale."
She had been feeling outpointed, but at this all her selfrighteousness came back. Leaning forward, she stared at him. "Monty, you can still say that? After what I've said to you? Just to have somebody take care of you, you'd ask me to marry you? Haven't you any more self-respect than that?"
"Ah, but that's what I was going to say."
"Monty, don't make it any worse than it is. If I got excited about it, you were going to let it stay said. If I didn't, you were going to pretend that was what you were going to say. Gee, Monty, but you're some man, aren't you?"
"Now suppose you listen to what I am going to say."
"No, I'm going home."
She got up, but he leaped at her, seized her by both arms, and flung her back in her chair. The little glittering points of light in his eyes were dancing now, and his face was drawn and hard. "Do you know why Veda never invites anybody to that house of yours? Do you know why nobody, except that stringbean that lives next door, ever goes there?"
"Yes—because you set her against me and—"
"Because you are a goddam varlet, and you're afraid to have people come there, because you wouldn't know what to do about them—you just haven't got the nerve."
Looking into his contorted face, she suddenly had the same paralyzed, shrunken feeling she had had the morning Miss Turner told her off, and sent her over to, the housekeeper's job, because there was nothing else she could do. And she kept shrinking, as Monty went on, pouring a torrent of bitter, passionate invective at her. "It's not her. It's not me. It's you. Doesn't that strike you as funny? That Veda has a hundred friends, here, there, everywhere she goes, and that you haven't any? No, I'm wrong—you have one. That bartender. And that's all. Nobody ever gets invited to your house, nobody—"
"What are you talking about? How can I give parties, or invite people, with a living to make? Why you—"
"Living, my eye! That's the alibi, not the reason. You damned little kitchen scullion, you'd tell me who's setting your child against you? Me? Listen, Mildred. Nobody but a varlet would give a second's thought to what you've been talking about tonight. Because that's the difference. A lady doesn't care. A varlet does."
He walked around, panting, then turned on her again. "And I like a fool, like a damned idiot, I once thought maybe I'd been mistaken, that you were a lady, and not a varlet. That was when you handed me the $20 bill that night, and I took it. And then I took more. I even gave you credit for something. God knows what it is, some sense of humor that only an aristocrat ever has, and asked you for money. And then what? Could you go through with it? The very thing that you yourself started? A lady would have cut her heart out before she let me know the money meant anything. But you, before I had even fifty bucks out of you, you had to make a chauffeur out of me, didn't you? To get your money's worth? A lackey, a poodle dog. You had to rub it in. Well no more. I've taken my