The Glorious Pool by Thorne Smith

SUE PEBBLE was Rex Pebble's wife. She had been that for twenty-one years. Obdurately, determinedly, Rex Pebble's wife. There had been times, in those years, when Sue's patience had been strained to the breaking point, but she never gave up. Start a thing, you must finish it, was Sue's philosophy, even if in name only. She liked being Mrs. Rex Pebble, she liked the house she lived in, she was not blind to her husband's faults, and best of all, she was not blind to her own. Mrs. Pebble liked her fun and could take it. Though her heart line may have somewhat resembled the twisting course of the Snake River during the years of her marriage with Rex, she had at least pursued a tangent of tacit honesty, and she had made Rex a good home.

Mrs. Pebble glanced about the spacious, well-appointed living room. Violently addicted to change in a great many different things, perhaps her best expression of this attitude had been in the quick adoption and equally rapid scrapping of various modes of house furnishings. This room, like Mrs. Pebble's emotions, had gone through regimes of horsehair, mission, antique, and Colonial. The room was now modern. It was hard but not harsh, with its pleasing tubular curves of gleaming metal and its soft, downy corduroy upholstery. Mrs. Pebble looked about her with evident satisfaction, while in a small mirror that she held in her hand she proceeded to make up her race. There was some contrast here. There were few modern lines in Sue Pebble's face. Sue had reached fifty-five years of age, and despite her often frantic efforts to deceive, on close observation she looked it.