Tomorrow Is Forever Read Online Free Page A

Cherry, and bring them in; we can use them.”
    â€œI’ll get the ice,” Dick offered, scrambling out of the pool. “Julia, you and Pudge wait for us here, you don’t know where things are.” He took up a towel from the grass and began scrubbing his lean brown legs. “The trunks are drippy, but I won’t go anywhere but in the kitchen,” he promised before Elizabeth could give him any orders.
    â€œAll right,” she agreed, and started for the house. Crossing a balcony that ran along the back, she entered the den which the children were allowed to use as their own, and paused to glance with curiosity at some disreputably dusty old magazines stacked up against the wall. They looked like the accumulation of years from an attic; what the children meant to do with them she could not imagine, unless one of the schools was having a drive for the Salvation Army.
    The door leading to the kitchen burst open and Dick put his head in.
    â€œMother, do you want a glass of lemonade?”
    â€œWhy yes, I’d love one.”
    â€œYou’ll have to come get it, unless I’m allowed on the rug.”
    â€œI’ll come get it,” she said hastily, and went into the kitchen before he could bring his dripping trunks into the den. Dick and Cherry were making a great racket with ice cubes and glasses, their suits leaving puddles on the linoleum and bringing unhappy glances from the cook. “What are all those old papers doing in the den?” Elizabeth asked as she accepted a glass from Dick.
    â€œThey’re ours,” Cherry answered, “Julia’s and mine, I mean. We’ve got to write an essay for costume design about the evolution of twentieth-century clothes. Julia found those old magazines up in the attic at her house and we’re going to get some ideas from them.”
    â€œI see. Don’t bring them into the living room unless you dust them off.”
    â€œOkay,” said Cherry. She disappeared with the pitcher of lemonade, and Dick held up a box of cookies he had found on a cupboard shelf.
    â€œCan we have these, mother?”
    â€œSuch appetites! Very well, take them.”
    â€œThanks.” He followed Cherry out to the pool. When she had conferred with the cook about dinner, Elizabeth went upstairs.
    She glanced into Spratt’s room. Everything there was in order—cigarettes in the boxes, matches and ashtrays beside them, Time and Newsweek on the table, along with a couple of novels from an agency and a notebook in which Spratt could scribble ideas about their picture possibilities. She made sure his pencils were sharpened, drew a curtain across one window through which the sun was pouring in to fade the rug, and went through the communicating doorway into her own room.
    This was her favorite spot in the whole house. Much as she loved her family there were times when she was glad to be alone, and this was the only place that was entirely hers. Here everything was arranged to please herself—the bed with its monogrammed blue cover, the dressing-table with long lights down either side and convenient shelves for her creams and perfumes. In one corner stood her radio, so she could listen to the programs she liked without interruption, and in another corner the desk and wastebasket that Spratt called her office, since it was there that she wrote letters, paid bills, jotted household memoranda and took care of the various other tasks that had to be performed with pen and paper. By a window was her chaise-longue, and on the table beside it lay the book she was reading, her cigarettes, a desk calendar, her private telephone and notebook of unlisted numbers. Though the windows were usually open her room always had a faint fragrance of its own, compounded of toilet soap and the lotions she used to protect her skin from the dryness of the air. Whenever she came inside and the familiar scent greeted her, Elizabeth felt delightfully