Lamb's Visit and Russell's Return — Alice Adams

J. A. Lamb is eighty, rosy and hale, perhaps the last great merchant in the country to wear a chin beard, and his quick blue eyes miss nothing. He will not sit down. He tells Adams, wrapped in blankets, not to hurry back. They need him, but the old place would wait ten years for him if it had to. He repeats it to Alice all the way down the stairs and calls it back once more from the dark. Alice likes him; he sounds solid and kind. Her mother asks only whether he said anything about raising her husband's salary.

Adams glows. Lamb is the biggest man the town has ever had, he tells Alice, Simon pure, and his trust makes a man want to deserve it; it is not all dollars and cents. The next evening he comes down to dinner and finds the house scrubbed and carnations in a vase, bought with the dollar and a half Alice coaxed out of him that morning. He thinks the fuss is for him. Walter sings a song about a sweet thing and tells his father to wait and see. Nobody comes. Alice waits in the living-room until half-past nine, and the next evening again. On the third morning she throws the drooping carnations away.

That night she sits on the front steps while girls along the street laugh with the clerks who court them. They are girls of another caste, who will never see a dance at the Palmers'. She has given Russell up. Little affairs must be warmed quickly or they die. She feels like a boy who spots a shining dime and picks up tin-foil, and Frincke's stairway rises in her mind like a doorway to Purgatory. Then a tall figure comes up the street swinging a stick. Russell has spent two evenings at Palmer dinners, wishing he were here. He has taken an apartment and means to stay. In the War he was a major in transportation. Alice tells him the cousinship is 'quite an advantage' for Mildred.

When he asks what kind of girl she is, she warns him never to ask Mildred: perfect creatures ruin imperfect ones by looking absent-minded and saying almost nothing. She admits she meant never to be herself with him, and here she is. May he come often? She makes him lean close, then shouts 'YES!' They will walk the day after tomorrow, and he hopes to see her at Henrietta Lamb's dance, or better, take her there. Alice has not been invited. She says her father is too ill for her to go, and her voice catches. At the open window above, her mother has heard every word. She rises, trembling, and goes to her husband's room.