Modern Screen (Dec 1948 - Oct 1949)

ginia should have entered a protest right then and there. But she didn't. Maybe she was just nonplussed by the suddenness of it. Or — well, it was wartime, Clark was in uniform, and wasn't it a thing between girls those days that getting into the Army and Navy seemed to be having an unusual effect on fellows, and one had to be tolerant with them? One thing is definitely known. Virginia considered Clark's demonstrative greeting as a flash of the moment, soon to be forgotten. She was wrong. Clark's enthusiasm for her didn't abate a bit. Before he left he had won from her an acceptance to have dinner with him at his place the next night. She accepted, went and had a wonderful time. It was not only fun, not only an event to be commemorated by a whopping bottle of Chanel No. 5 which he insisted she take as a souvenir of the occasion, but the first of many other similar dinners and many other happy days together. She got to know a lot about Clark. She saw, and is quoted as reporting, that while the places of the fashionable had an attraction for him, he found them too cobwebby underfoot for permanent comfort. He was a man who had never denied his simple background nor accounted for his success by any other words than, "How lucky can you be?" He told Virginia about his boyhood, when he loved to go ice-skating and return home to have his mother stick his halffrozen feet into a tub of hot water and feed him gingerbread. This story, she decided later, was a sort of alibi for the frequent presence on his dinner table of his favorite dessert — gingerbread. Clark's house stands on a 15-acre tract of land. After the death of Carole he talked often of selling it. But the idea seemed to fade after he met Virginia. She admitted quite freely to her friends that she had talked against it; that she had told Clark he was a homesteader at heart and would find himself missing the place the moment it was no longer his. And Clark must have listened because he would quote her when his friends asked if he were going to dispose of the house. "Ginny thinks I ought to keep it," he would reply simply. Watching them, hearing of their activi ties, their friends decided they were both homesteaders. Clark has a fence around his house and corral. Virginia helped him whitewash it — a job that took five days. His driveway is lined with oleander bushes. Virginia helped select and plant them. For that matter, when she bought piping to lay under her lawn for a watering system, it was Clark's turn to help her and he carted every foot of the pipe to his place so he could cut and thread the ends to fit. He's handy that way. It was all fun. They were fun. Being together was fun. That's why those who were close enough to them to see this, find it difficult to think of them permanently apart now. It isn't that they suspect Clark's heart is breaking but that they know he loved being with Virginia, loved being able to be himself when he was with her — which is perhaps more important for him. Some of his friends catch themselves watching him for an indication of how he feels about the split-up. They know that a happy Clark shows the world how it is going with him — he carries his disposition on his sleeve, if not his heart. In a figurative way, he loves to take off his shoes, curl up his feet and expand into amusing talk if he is happy. If he is unhappy, he makes this plain too. He may be with the most beautiful girl in the world but the tell-tale actions mean the same thing. He sits up severely straight, he tightens and jerks at his necktie, he clock-watches and, if he talks at all, he bites his words until they come out raw and encourage no answers. But it is Virginia and her reasons for seemingly being able to take the break-up in calm stride (if she didn't actually precipitate it, as some hold), that intrigues most of their friends. Did anything new in their relationship form the basis for the change in her attitude which formerly had seen her ready to run to him whenever and however he beckoned? Had she once loved him so much that it had made no difference who else he was seen with — and now, is this love gone? Or is it the reverse? Did this love grow until it could no longer share him, could no longer be all of her life and just a part of his — and moved her, in desperation, to finish it? The End MODERN SCREEN Tape it eas^ ! A strip of Cellophane Tape along the back of your galoshes will keep stockings from wearing or streaking. 'Exciting, wasn't it? TRANSPARENT AS GLASS Buy It At Your Favorite Store • Tips on everything from gift wrapping to mending picture frames in our new booklet "Tape It Easy!" 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