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falling in love with her. Then he dropped her abruptly and forgot –
immediately he took up the commanding position in her heart.
Like so many girls of that day Dolly was slackly and
indiscreetly wild. The unconventionality of a slightly older generation
had been simply one facet of a post-war movement to discredit
obsolete manners – Dolly's was both older and shabbier, and she saw
in Anson the two extremes which the emotionally shiftless woman
seeks, an abandon to indulgence alternating with a protective
strength. In his character she felt both the sybarite and the solid rock,
and these two satisfied every need of her nature.
She felt that it was going to be difficult, but she mistook the
reason – she thought that Anson and his family expected a more
spectacular marriage, but she guessed immediately that her advantage
lay in his tendency to drink.
They met at the large debutante dances, but as her infatuation
increased they managed to be more and more together. Like most
mothers, Mrs. Karger believed that Anson was exceptionally reliable,
so she allowed Dolly to go with him to distant country clubs and
suburban houses without inquiring closely into their activities or
questioning her explanations when they came in late. At first these
explanations might have been accurate, but Dolly's worldly ideas of
capturing Anson were soon engulfed in the rising sweep of her
emotion. Kisses in the back of taxis and motor-cars were no longer
enough; they did a curious thing.
They dropped out of their world for a while and made another
world just beneath it where Anson's tippling and Dolly's irregular
hours would be less noticed and commented on. It was composed,
this world, of varying elements – several of Anson's Yale friends and
their wives, two or three young brokers and bond salesmen and a
handful of unattached men, fresh from college, with money and a
propensity to dissipation. What this world lacked in spaciousness and
scale it made up for by allowing them a liberty that it scarcely
permitted itself. Moreover, it centred around them and permitted
Dolly the pleasure of a faint condescension – a pleasure which
Anson, whose whole life was a condescension from the certitudes of
his childhood, was unable to share.
He was not in love with her, and in the long feverish winter of
their affair he frequently told her so. In the spring he was weary - he
wanted to renew his life at some other source - moreover, he saw that