At seven o’clock she put on her best clothes and went up to dinner. She shared a table with a Mr. and Mrs. Sheffield from Rochester, who were going abroad for the second time. They were traveling with orlon wardrobes. During dinner they told Honora about their earlier trip to Europe. They went first to Paris, where they had nice weather—nice drying weather, that is. Each night, they took turns washing their clothes in the bathtub and hanging them out to dry. Going down the Loire they ran into rain and were not able to do any wash for nearly a week, but once they reached the sea the weather was sunny and dry, and they washed everything. They flew to Munich on a sunny day and did their wash in the Regina Palast, but in the middle of the night there was a thunderstorm and all their clothing, hung out on a balcony, got soaked. They had to pack their wardrobes wet for the trip to Innsbruck, but they reached Innsbruck on a clear and starry night and hung everything out to dry again. There was another thunderstorm in Innsbruck, and they had to spend a day in their hotel room, waiting for their clothes to dry. Venice was a wonderful place for laundry. They had very little trouble in Italy, and during their Papal audience Mrs. Sheffield convinced herself that the Pope’s vestments were made of orlon. They remembered Geneva for its rainy weather, and London was very disappointing. They had theater tickets, but nothing would dry, and they had to spend two days in their room. Edinburgh was even worse, but in Skye the clouds lifted and the sun shone, and they took a plane home from Prestwick with everything clean and dry. The sum of their experience was to warn Honora against planning to do much wash in Bavaria, Austria, Switzerland and the British Isles.
Toward the end of this account, Honora’s face got very red, and suddenly she leaned across the table and said, “Why don’t you stay home and do your wash? Why do you travel halfway around the world, making a spectacle of yourself in front of the waiters and chambermaids of Austria and France? I’ve never owned a stitch of orlon, or whatever you call it, but I expect I’ll find laundries and dry cleaners in Europe just as at home, and I’m sure I’d never travel for the pleasure of hanging out a clothesline.”
The Sheffields were shocked and embarrassed. Honora’s voice carried, and passengers at the nearby tables had turned to stare at her. She tried to extricate herself by calling a waiter. “Check,” she called. “Check. Will you please bring me my check?”
“There is no check, madam,” the waiter said.
“Oh, yes,” she said, “I forgot,” and limped out of the room.
She was too angry at the Sheffields to be remorseful, but she was faced again with the fact that her short temper was one of her worst qualities. She wandered around the decks to cool off, admiring the yellowish shroud lights and thinking how like a second set of stars they were. She was standing on the stern deck, watching the wake, when a young man in a pinstriped suit joined her. They had a pleasant conversation about the stars, and then she went to bed and slept soundly.
In the morning, after a hearty breakfast, Honora arranged for a deck chair on the leeward side. She then settled herself with a novel (
