A Cup of Tea: A Novel of 1917 by Amy Ephron

to placate Sarah than to miss an experience. “Can I offer you a little more champagne?”
    Rosemary’s father stuck his head in for a moment and decided he’d rather not be part of this gathering, at least for the moment. He helped himself to a toast with salmon and retired, presumably, to his study.
    Jane and Philip were standing by the window which was framed by heavy velvet drapes. They were talking softly, almost conspiratorially.
    “You’ve seen her?” Jane asked but it was more a statement than a question. And there was a look on his face which made it all seem not so light anymore, not something simply to be dabbled in. “Are you sure you haven’t taken on more than you can…”
    He put a hand on her arm and tried to stop her but she continued questioning him.
    “Are you feeling a certain amount of guilt?” Jane asked.
    He came right back at her. “Are you?”
    They didn’t notice Rosemary was standing thereuntil she spoke. “Do either of you need another drink?” And then, because Jane looked so startled, Rosemary said, “Oh, I’ve interrupted you.”
    “No,” said Jane, a little bit too quickly, “we were just discussing the pressures of war on modern society.”
    “A subject I’m familiar with but would rather not discuss,” said Rosemary. She gave Philip a kiss on the cheek and went off to tend to her other guests.
    “A certain amount of guilt,” said Philip after she was a safe distance away. “Yes, I would say that.”

 
    I t was hard to tell what the aged Miss Wetzel thought of her charges, if they could indeed be called that. Certainly, if you asked her, the nature of the individual girls she’d boarded in the last ten years had become as a whole markedly wilder and more independent. No one ever stayed there very long. Wetzel’s was a stopping place. But except for an occasional stern reprimand when one of the house rules was broken, Miss Wetzel mostly kept to herself, retiring at half past eight each night to her lonely bed and the few pages of the Bible, New Testament only, she read before retiring. The girls treated the house more like a boarding school,preferring to do their living in their rooms instead of in the bleak and modest parlor downstairs. And once Wetzel fell asleep, as she could barely hear when awake, they felt it would take a near avalanche to rouse her.
    Eleanor liked the simplicity of Wetzel’s. Most nights she stayed in. It had been so long since she’d felt safe anywhere. Since childhood when she’d had to dodge her father’s drunken rages that could turn so easily to maudlin self-pity (which was somehow even harder for her to bear)—she’d always felt as though she’d been on her own. She would take a bit of work home from the shop some nights. On the night in question, she was sitting at the vanity in her room, wearing the silk shawl that Philip had bought for her wrapped around her shoulders, imitating the casual nature of two women who were in the shop that day, running Dora fairly ragged but spending. They were not her usual sort of customers, as Dora seemed to specialize in Old New York . These were women who had married well, blonde with perfectly made-up faces. They were women who had invented themselves successfully, as if they themselves were something to be marketed, and they shopped the way a child would shop, unbridled in a toy store.
    “I’ll have one of those,” said the first woman pointing to an elegant forest green hat with a veil as if therewere many of them sitting somewhere on a shelf. “Oh,” she added as if it had just occurred to her, “and I need a navy blue hat.”
    Dora obligingly showed her one which was instantly accepted, rather than scrutinized, as if she didn’t realize if she were to reject it, two or three other styles would magically appear.
    Eleanor stood in the doorway of the workroom watching them, silently studying their moves.
    The second woman, who looked very much like the first woman except that she was