Page:Manhattan Transfer (John Dos Passos, 1925).djvu/402

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Manhattan Transfer

was looking at a photograph in a rotogravure section labeled Mr. and Mrs. Jack Cunningham Hop Off for the First Lap of Their Honeymoon on his Sensational Seaplane Albatross VII. "He looks handsome dont he?"

"He su' is miss. . . . But wasn't there anything you could do to stop 'em, miss?"

"Not a thing. . . . You see he said he'd have me committed to an asylum if I tried. . . . He knows perfectly well a Yucatan divorce isn't legal."

Florence sighed.

"Menfolks su' do dirt to us poor girls."

"Oh this wont last long. You can see by her face she's a nasty selfish spoiled little girl. . . . And I'm his real wife before God and man. Lord knows I tried to warn her. Whom God has joined let no man put asunder . . . that's in the Bible isnt it? . . . Florence this coffee is simply terrible this morning. I cant drink it. You go right out and make me some fresh."

Frowning and hunching her shoulders Florence went out the door with the tray.

Mrs. Cunningham heaved a deep sigh and settled herself among the pillows. Outside churchbells were ringing. "Oh Jack you darling I love you just the same," she said to the picture. Then she kissed it. "Listen, deary the churchbells sounded like that the day we ran away from the High School Prom and got married in Milwaukee. . . . It was a lovely Sunday morning." Then she stared in the face of the second Mrs. Cunningham. "Oh you," she said and poked her finger through it.

When she got to her feet she found that the courtroom was very slowly sickeningly going round and round; the white fishfaced judge with noseglasses, faces, cops, uniformed attendants, gray windows, yellow desks, all going round and round in the sickening close smell, her lawyer with his white hawk nose, wiping his bald head, frowning, going round and