Guestward Ho! Read Online Free PDF

meanest, dullest female west of the Mississippi, she had every right to think so. I wouldn't learn, I couldn't learn, because I just plain didn't want to learn. I was sad and sullen and lonely and almost driven insane by the silence of the wide-open spaces. All I wanted to do was to get into Santa Fe, off to Taos or Albuquerque—any place where there were people and not just silence and horses. On the last day of March the Delanos left us, too, and then there weren't any other people at all—only Bill and I alone in the wilderness.
     
     

4. Guest appearance
     
    You can get used to anything, I've discovered, especially if you can talk yourself into believing it's only temporary. Gloom is fine for funerals and martyrdom is just splendid for saints, but I wasn't quite yet dead and by no means saintly. Besides, it has been my misfortune to know quite a lot of petulant, childish women who have had an absolute genius for turning a stroke of bad luck into a major ca tastrophe. John gets transferred from a paradise like Paris to a hole like Aden, Jim doesn't get promoted to vice- president, Harry loses his job, and what do the little women do? They weep, they moan, they complain, they look like keeners at breakfast and corpses at dinner. They make everything just twice as hard as it is, and if John or Jim or Harry don't turn into wife-beaters or philanderers it's only because their wives have depressed them beyond making the effort.
    I happen to be better suited to comedy than to tragedy and, besides, Bill and I had always landed on our feet be fore and we would more than likely do it again. All I wanted was to get this boots-and-saddles nonsense out of my husband and land on my feet back, in New York. I figured that the quickest way of doing it was to go along with him, let him get his fill of the wide-open spaces, and then lure him back to civilization. I was getting kind of bored with playing The Lost Soul seven nights and seven matinees a week, anyhow. Oh, I'd smiled, once or twice, but I hadn't really meant it.
    What really broke the ice was Bill's first solo trip into town. Up until that point he'd looked kind of like an Abercrombie & Fitch window dummy—Eastern-Western, if you know what I mean. He had blue jeans, all right, but they were kind of loose and baggy. With them he wore loafers and challis ties and button-down Oxford shirts and tweed jackets; all very pretty for Long Island or Con necticut, but so Brooksy that people turned and stared at him on the streets of Santa Fe. Then he made the plunge, quite unaided and alone, while I was spending my last moments of sullenness out on the ranch.
    All I had expected from Bill's trip to town was mail, the New York Times of two days ago, and a pound of butter. What I got was the shock of my life. Bill stepped out of the station wagon done up for a masquerade ball. At the post office, he'd been lured into the Santa Fe Western Wear Shop, run by Gertrude and Mark Campbell, a de licious couple from Oklahoma. The Campbells had en couraged him to go Western with a vengeance, and Bill certainly had. He came teetering up onto the terrace in a pair of boots with sort of run-over high heels that reminded me of my first grown-up slippers. He was wearing blue jeans so tight that he must have had to powder his thighs to get into them and the plaidest shirt I've ever seen, as well as a suede coat with enough fringe to make a dozen piano shawls; Topped off by a kind of felt picture hat, he looked seven feet tall. "Hopalong Hooton!" was all I could say, then I started laughing and went right on laughing all through lunch.
    Bill was a good deal less amused than I was. In fact, he began to feel so self-conscious in his cowboy suit that he took to skulking around corners and hiding in doorways as though, by a series of hideous misfortunes, he had been caught quite naked in the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria. But, unusual as he was, he did look wonderful, and even I got a hankering for fancy