Young People's Pride (Harper's Bazar serial)/Part 2
NANCY ELLICOTT hadn't really meant to break her engagement to Louis Crowe. Even when, after eight months of it, Louis' novel and Louis job in an advertising agency had both failed to produce the necessary funds that were to take them back to Paris for work and material—for both Louis and Nancy were artists, though not Greenwich Villagers. But her conventional mother had always distrusted Louis and Louis had seemed so unreasonable over her chance to get a job in the European office of Harper's Bazar and young people's pride in both of them had prevented any helpful sort of explanation. So Louis found himself in jail that evening for calling a St. Louis policeman a big blue boob in a moment of pique—and when he tried to explain matters to Mrs. Ellicott over the telephone next morning, that excellent lady reverted o the Primitive Female Protecting Her Young. Exit Louis, therefore, to New York, a firing of himself from his job, and a bitter decision to go to Sheol by the nearest and most gentlemanly route while Nancy stayed in St. Louis sick at heart but unwilling to be the first to make up. Meanwhile, Ted Billett, Louis' closest friend, and three-quarters in love with Elinor Piper, daughter of the great financier, was slipping into an entanglement with the lovely and mysterious Mrs. Severance whose apartment on Riverside Drive seemed a little too expensive to be accounted for by the salary she got from Mode. Louis' worry over the latter complication grew—Ted was restless and scarred by memories of France—what would happen if Mrs. Severance—?
The tiredness that had been in the man's face began to leave it
A Rapid Glance at Part I
There was very good reason indeed for Louis to worry. For that very evening, as he did his best to reduce the family conversation to monosyllables at Scarsdale a scene was going on in Mrs. Severance's expensive apartment on Riverside Drive that would have opened his eyes to much. Mrs. Severance was dining delightfully—but she was not dining with Ted—and her guest though a good deal older than herself, seemed very much at home. And meanwhile a letter from Peter Piper was on the way to Scarsdale, asking Louis down to Southampton over Labor Day for Elinor's dance—Ted was to be there, too—and the complicated net of circumstance into which the four young people had stepped so blithely was to draw dangerously close about them before the orchestra had started playing “Home, Sweet Home.” For Ted had come to the cross roads of decision, and when Elinor—but that's telling the secrets of the second instalment of this brilliant novel of modern young people before we should.
Part II
THE sky had been a blue steam all day, but at night it quieted; there were faint airs. From the window of the apartment on Riverside Drive you could see it grow gentle, fade from a strong heat of azure through gray gauze into darkness, thick-soft as a sable's fur at first, then uneasily patterned all at once with idle leopard-spottings and strokes of light. The lights fell into the river and dissolved, the dark wash took them and carried them into streaks of lesser, more fluid light. Even so, if there could have been country silence for even five minutes at a time, the running river, the hills so disturbed with light beyond, might have worn some aspect of peace. But even in the high bird's-nest of the apartment there was no real silence, only a pretending at silence, like the forced quiet of a child told to keep still in a corner—the two people dining together could talk in whispers, if they wanted, and still be heard, but always at the back of the brain of either ran a thin pulsation of mumbling sound like the buzz of a kettle-drum softly struck in a passage of music where the orchestra talks full-voiced—the night sound of the city, breathing and moving and saying words.
They must have been married rather contentedly for quite a while now, they said so little of importance at dinner and yet seemed so quietly pleased at having dinner together and so neat at understanding half sentences without asking explanations. That would have been the first conclusion of anybody who had been able to take out a wall and watch their doll-house unobserved. Besides, though the short, decided man with the grayish hair must be fifty at least, the woman who stood his own height when she rose from the table was too slimly mature for anything but the thirties. Not a highly original New York couple by any means—a prospering banker or president of a Consolidated Toothpick Company with a beautiful wife, American matron-without-children model, except for her chin which was less dimpled than cleft with decisiveness and the wholly original luster of her hair, a buried luster like the shine of “Murray's red gold” in a Border ballad. A wife rather less society-stricken than the run of such wives, since she obviously preferred hot August in a New York apartment with her husband's company to beach-picnics at Greenwich or Southampton without it. Still the apartment, though compact as an army mess-kit, was perfectly furnished, and the maid who had served the cool little dinner was an efficient effacedness of the race that housekeepers with large families and little money assert passed with the Spanish War. Money enough, and the knowledge of how to use it without blatancy or pinching—that would have been the second conclusion.
They were sitting in deep chairs in the living-room now, a tall-stemmed reading lamp glowing softly between them, hardly speaking. The tiredness that had been in the man's face like the writing in a “crossed” letter began to leave it softly. He reached over, took the woman's hand and held it—not closely or with greediness but with a firm clasp that had something weary like appeal in it and something strong like a knowledge of rest.
“Always like this, at home,” he said slowly.
“It is rather sweet.” Her voice had the gentleness of water running into water. Her eyes looked at him once and left him deliberately, but not as if they didn't care. It must have been a love-match in the beginning then—her eyes seemed so infirm.
“You'll read a little?”
“Yes.”
“Home,” he said. He seemed queerly satisfied to say the word, queerly moved as if, even after so much reality had been lived through together, he couldn't quite believe that it was reality.
“And I've been waiting for it—five days, six days, this time?”
SHE must have been at the seashore after all—tan or lack of it meant little these days, especially to a woman who lived in this kind of an apartment. The third conclusion might been rather sentimental, a title out of a picture—something about “Even in the Wastes of the Giant City the Weary Heart Will Turn To—Just Home.”
Louis remembers that he saw a slim Chinese girl go of the floor with a tall musketeer.
A doll on a small table began to buzz mysteriously in its internals. The man released the woman's hand—both looking deeply annoyed.
“I thought we had a private number here,” said the man, the tiredness coming back into his face like scribbles on parchment.
She crossed to the telephone with a charming furtiveness—you could see she was playing they had just been found behind the piano together in a game of hide-and-seek. The doll was disemboweled of its telephone.
“No—No—Oh, very well—”
“What was it?”
She smiled,
“Is this the Eclair Picture Palace?” she mimicked.
Both seemed almost childishly relieved. So in spite of his successful-business-man mouth, he wasn't the kind that is less a husband than a telephone-receiver, especially at home. Still, she would have made a difference even to telephone-receivers, that could be felt even without the usual complement of senses.
“That was—bothersome for a minute.” His tone lent the words a quaint accent of scare.
“Oh, well if you have one at all—the way the service is now—”
“There won't be any telephones when we take our vacation together, that's settled.”
She had been kneeling, examining a bookcase for books. Now she turned with one in her hand, her hair ruddy and smooth as amber in the reflected light. “No, but telegrams. And wireless,” she whispered mockingly, the more mockingly because it so obviously made him worried as a worried boy.
She came over and stood smoothing his ear a moment, a half-unconscious customary gesture, no doubt, for he relaxed under it and the look of rest came back. Then she went to her chair, sat down and opened the book.
“No use borrowing trouble now, dear. Now listen, cigar?”
“Going.”
“Ash-tray?”
“Yes.”
“And remember not to knock it over when you get excited. Promise?”
“Um.”
“Very well.”
Mrs. Severance's even voice began to flow into the stillness.
“As I was getting too big for Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt—”
“AND that's the end of the chapter,” Mrs. Severance's voice trailed off into silence. She closed the book with a soft sound. The man, whom it might be rather more convenient than otherwise to call Mr. Severance, opened his eyes. He had not been asleep, but he had found by a good deal of experience that he paid more attention to Dickens if he closed his eyes while she read.
“Thank you, dear.”
“Thank you. You know I love it. Especially Pip.”
He considered.
“There was a word one of my young men used the other day about Dickens. Gusto, I think—yes, that was it. Well, I find that, as I grow older, that seems to be the thing I value rather more than most men of my age. Gusto.” He smiled. “Though I take it more—quietly, perhaps—than I did when I was young,” he added rather quaintly.
“You are young,” said Mrs. Severance carefully.
“Not really, dear. I can give half a dozen youngsters I know four strokes in nine holes and beat them. I can handle the bank in half the time and with half the worry that some of my people take to one department. And for a little while more, Rose, I may be able to satisfy you. But,” and he passed a hand lightly over his hair, “it's gray, you know,” he ended.
“As if it mattered,” said Mrs. Severance, a little pettishly.
“It does matter, Rose.” His eyes darkened with memory—with the sort of memory that hurts more to forget than even to remember. “Do you realize that I am sixteen years older than you are?” he said a little hurriedly, as if he were trying to scribble the memory over with any kind of words.
“But, my dear,” and she smiled, “you were sixteen years older six years ago—remember? There's less real difference between us now than there was then.”
“Yes, I certainly wasn't as young in some ways—six years ago. but then nobody could be with you, for a month even, and not feel himself turn younger whether he wanted to or not.”
“So that's settled.” She was trying to carry it lightly, to take the darkness out of his eyes. “And once you've bought our steamer tickets we can leave it all behind at the wharf and by the time we land we'll be so disgracefully young that no one will recognize us—just think—we can keep going back and back till I'm putting my hair up for the first time and you're in little short trousers—and then babies, I suppose, and the other side of getting born—” but her voice, for once, turned ineffectually against his centeredness of gaze that seemed now as if it had turned back on itself for a struggling moment and regarded neither what was nor what might be, but only what was past.
“Six years ago,” he said with the same drowsy thoughtfulness. “Well, Rose, I shall always be—most grateful—for those six years.
SHE started to speak, but he checked her. “I think I would be willing to make a substantial endowment to any Protestant Church that still really believed in hell,” he said, “because that was very like hell—six years ago.'
Intensity began to come into his voice like a color of darkness, though he still spoke slowly.
“You can stand nearly everything in life but being tired of yourself. And six years ago I was tired—tired to death.”
Her hand reached over and touched him medicinally.
“I suppose I had no right,” he began again and then stopped. “No, I think the strong man tires less easily but more wholly than the weak one when he does tire. And I was strong enough.
“I'd played a big game, you know. When my father died we hadn't much left but position—and that was going. I don't blame my father—he wasn't a business man—he should have been a literary critic—that little book of essays of his still sells, you know; not much, but there's a demand for a dozen copies every year and that's a good deal for an American who's been dead for thirty. Well, that's where the children get their liking for things like that—I've got it, too, a little—I could have done something there if I'd had time. But I never had time.
“I could have done it when I got out of Harvard—drifted along like half a dozen people I know, played at law, played at writing, played always and forever at being a gentleman—ended up as an officer of the Century Club with what little money I had in an annuity. But I couldn't stand the idea of just scraping along. And for nearly ten years I put those things aside.
“You know about my going West and the way I lived there. It wasn't easy when I'd been at Harvard and gone everywhere in New York and Boston—starting in so far below the bottom that you couldn't even see the bottom unless you squinted your eyes. But I never took a job with more money if I thought I could learn anything in a job with less—and every place I went I stayed until I could handle the job of the man two places ahead of me—and if I didn't get his job when I asked for it I went somewhere else. I don't think I read a book except a technical one for the first five years. And after that, when the chain-stores started going they asked me back to New York— a big offer, too—but it wasn't the kind I wanted and I threw it down. I knew just how I wanted to come back to New York and that's the way I came.
“I don't suppose my morals were too edifying those years. But they were as good as the men I went with and I kept myself in hand. I saw men go to pieces with drink—and I didn't drink. I saw men go to pieces over women—and I kept away from that kind of woman. I could have married a dozen times if I'd wanted, but I didn't want—that old hocus-pocus of tradition was still with me, stronger than death—I thought I knew the kind of wife I wanted and she was in the East.
“Then the partnership with Jessup came and I took it. And after a year I was made. I wasn't the last of one of the penniless old families that give each other dinners once a month and pretend they're the real society because they haven't money enough to trail in the present society game; even by then I was—what did that last newspaper story say?—'a figure of nationwide importance.' Then it must be just about time, I thought. that this figure of nationwide importance began to look around a little, and married the wife he'd been waiting for, and started to pick up all the things he hadn't had for twelve years.
“Well—Mary. And I was so careful about Mary,” his lips twisted, half whimsically, half painfully. “I was so damn sure. I was so damn sure I knew everything about women.
“She had all the qualities I'd said to myself I wanted—beauty, position, breeding, a good enough mind, some common sense. She hadn't money, but there I thought I could help her—the way she ran things for her father on what they had showed what she could do with more. We weren't in love with each other—oh, dear no—but that I considered on the whole an advantage—she attracted me, and it's fair enough to say that beside most of the men she'd been seeing my combination of having been Old New York and being one of the young big coming men from the West on my own ability dazzled her rather. And anyhow I didn't want—passion—exactly. I thought it would take too much time when I was only in the middle of my game and getting as much real solid fun out of it as a kid gets out of cooking his own dinner in camp. I wanted a partner and a home and children and somebody to sit at the head of my table when I wanted to be—public—and yet somebody you could be at home with when you wanted to be at home. And I thought I had them all in Mary—I thought I was being about the most sensible man in the world.
“Well, up till after both children were born I think I tried pretty hard. I gave her all I could think of—materially at least. And then I found out in spite of myself that you can't be married to a woman—even bearably—and neither be lovers nor friends with her. And Mary and I never got beyond the social acquaintance stage.
“It wasn't all Mary's fault, either—I can see that now. A good deal was in the way she'd been brought up—they weren't modern about the blisses of ignorance in the 'nineties. But the rest of it was Mary and she couldn't have changed it any more than she could have been rude to a servant, or raised her voice more than usual when she really wanted something done.
“She'd been brought up never to be demonstrative—that was one thing. But that wasn't the main trouble—the main trouble was her most curious, most frigid self-sufficiency. Until her children came she was the most wholly self-sufficient person I've ever known. She was really only happy when she was entirely alone, always. It wasn't egotism exactly—she's always had a very well-mannered conviction of her own relative unimportance—it was just that in spite of the fact that she seemed so perfectly healthy and calm and composed whenever she was with other people they'd be sure to hurt her a little somehow or other without meaning to—the only person she could genuinely depend on never to hurt her was herself.
“As for men, she'd formed one crystallized opinion of men in the first weeks of our marriage and she's kept it ever since. She looks at them as if they were a kind of tame wolf about the house—something you must never show you're afraid of, something you must feed and look after and be publicly amiable to because you must be just—but something you never, never would bring in the house of your own accord or touch without feeling the you, that you had to preserve so jealously against all the things that could possibly hurt it, start to shrink and be pained inside.
“Then the children came—she did and does love them. She lives for them. But they're part of herself, too, you see, an essential part, and as she can't give herself to anybody but herself she can't give them to me even in the easiest kind of partnership, really. You don't leave small children alone with even the tamest kind of wolf—and she's the kind of woman whose children are always small to her. And she's their mother—and so she has her way.
“That's the way it got worse. Right up to six years ago.
“I'd done my job—I was president of the Commercial. And I'd made my money, and the money still kept coming in almost as if it didn't make any difference what I did about it. I'd won my game. And what was there in it for me?
I didn't have a home—I had a place where I ate and slept. I didn't have a wife—I had an acquaintance who kept house for me. I had children—at school and college. I didn't have real hobbies—I hadn't had time for them. And I was forty-nine. All I could do was go on making money till I died.
“Well, you changed that,” his voice shook a little.
“You came and I saw and knew and took you. And I'm not sorry. Because you've made me alive again. And I'm going to be alive now till I die.
“Funny—I was never so anxious about anything happening as I have been about—our approaching mutual disappearance. Especially the last six months when I've been planning. But now that's settled.
“Mary will have more than enough, and the children are grown, They won't know—I still have brains enough to settle that and money will do nearly anything. It'll be a nine days' wonder. 'Sudden Disappearance of Prominent Financier—Foul Play Suspected,' and that'll be all.
“As for the Commercial—I haven't come to my age without finding out that nobody in the world is indispensable. If a taxi ran over me to-morrow, they'd have to do without me—and Harris and the young men can handle things.
“But you know where there'll be an elderly gentleman retired from business with a country house and a garden where he can putter around in all his worst clothes. And a wife that reads Dickens to him in the evening—oh, yes, Rose, we'll take Dickens along. And he'll be pretty contented as things go—that retired old gentleman.”
The darkness had passed from his eyes—he was smiling now.
“Be nice—eh, Rose?”
He took her hand—the warm touch was still strong, still reassuring. Only the eyes that he was not looking at now seemed singularly unsure, as if they had seen something they had pondered over lightly as a mere possibility, years ago, take on a sudden impatient body and demand to be heard.
She let her hand lie lightly in his for a moment. Then she rose.
“Half-past twelve,” she said a little stiffly. “Time for two such genuine antiques as we are to think of being put away in our cases for the night.”
JANE ELLEN swayed back and forth in the porch hammock, hugging herself with fat arms. All her dolls lay spread out wretchedly on the floor beneath her, she had stripped them of every rag and they had the dejected appearance of victims ready for sacrifice to Baal. “The Choolies are mad!” she sang to herself. “The Choolies are mad!”
It had been a perfectly sensible idea to try and water the flowers on the parlor carpet with her doll's watering-pot—those flowers hadn't had any water for an awful long time. But Mother had punished her in the Third Degree, which was by hair-brush, and Aunt Elsie had taken the watering-pot away, and Rosalind and Dickie had put on such offensively virtuous expressions as soon as they heard her being punished that she was mad at them all. And not ordinarily mad—not mad just by herself—the Choolies were divinely incensed as well.
“The Choolies are mad!” she hummed again like a battle-cry, “Choolies are dolls and all the Choolies are mad!”
The Choolies were only mad on rare occasions. It took something genuinely out of the ordinary to turn an inoffensive pink celluloid doll with one of its legs off into an angry Choolie. But when they were mad the family had discovered by painful experience the only thing to do was to leave Jane Ellen quite entirely alone.
“The Choolies are mad, mad, mad!” she chanted and chanted, her plump legs swinging, her mouth set like a prophet's calling down lightnings on Babylon the splendid.
Then she stopped swinging. Somebody was coming up the path—any of the people she was mad at?—no—only Uncle Louis. Were the Choolies mad at Uncle Louis? She considered a moment.
“Hello, Jane Ellen, how goes it?”
The small mouth was full of rebellion.
“Um mad!
“Oh—sorry. What a about?”
Defiantly:
“Um mad. And the Choolies are mad—they're mad—they're mad—”
Louis looked at her a moment, but was too wise to smile.
“They aren't mad at you, but they're mad at Motha and Aunt Elsie and Ro and Dickie and, oh—evvabody!” Jane Ellen stated graciously.
“Well, as long as they aren't mad at me— Any letters for me, Jane Ellen?”
“Yash.”
Louis found them on the desk, looked them over, once, twice. A letter from Peter Piper. Two advertisements, A letter with a French stamp. Nothing from Nancy.
Louis went out on the porch again to read his letters, to the accompaniment of Jane Ellen's untirable chant. “The Choolies are mad,” buzzed in his ears, “The Choolies, the Choolies are mad.” For a moment Louis saw the Choolies, they were all women like Mrs. Ellicott, but they stood up in front of him taller than the sky and one of them had hidden Nancy away in her black silk pocket—put her somewhere where Louis never would see her again.
“Louis, you look at me sternaly—don't look at me so sternaly, Louis—the Choolies aren't mad at you—” said Jane Ellen anxiously. “Fy do you look at me so sternaly?”
Louis grinned his best at her. “Sorry, Jane Ellen. But my girl's chucked me and I've chucked my job—and consequently all my Choolies are mad—”
THAT night was distinguished by four uneasy meals in different localities. The first was Louis' and he ate it as if he were consuming sawdust while the Crowes talked all around him in the suppressed voices of people watching a military funeral pass to its muffled drums. Mrs. Crowe was too wise to try and comfort him in public except by silence, and even Dickie was still too surprised at Louis' peevish “Oh, get out, kid,” when he tried to drag him into their usual evening boxing-match, to do anything but confide despondently to his mother that he didn't see why Louis had to act so queer about any girl.
The second meal was infinitely gayer on the surface, though a certain kind of strainedness, a little like the strainedness in the pauses of a perfectly friendly football game when both sides are too evenly matched to score, ran through it. Still, whatever strainedness there was could hardly have been Mrs. Severance's fault.
The impeccable Elizabeth showed no surprise at being told she could have the day and needn't be back till breakfast to-morrow. She might have thought that there seemed to be a good deal of rather perishable food in the ice-box to be wasted, if Mrs. Severance were going to have dinner out. But Elizabeth had always been one of the rare people who took pride in “knowing when they were suited,” and the apartment on Riverside Drive had suited her perfectly for four years. She was also a great deal too clever to abstract any of those fragile viands to take to her widowed sister on Long Island—Mrs. Severance was so good at finding uses for all sorts of odd things—Elizabeth felt sure she would find some use or other for that, too.
Ted certainly found a good deal of use for some of it, thought Mrs. Severance whimsically. It had hardly been a Paolo and Francesca diner-a-deux—both had been much too frankly hungry when they came to it and Ted's most romantic remarks so far had been devoted to a vivid precipitation of Mrs. Severance's housekeeping. But all men are very much like hungry little boys every so often, Mrs. Severance reflected.
Ted really began to wonder around nine thirty. At first there had been only coming in and finding Rose just through setting the table, and then they had been too busy with dinner and their usual fence of talk to allow for any unfortunate calculations as to how Mrs. Severance could do it on her salary. But what a perfect little apartment—and even supposing all the furniture and so forth was family inheritances, and they fitted each other much to smoothly for that, the mere upkeep of the place must run a good deal beyond any Mode salary. Mr. Severance? Ted wasn't sure. Oh, well, he was too comfortable at the moment to look gift horses of any description too sternly in the mouth.
Rose was beautiful—it was Ted and Rose by now. He would like to see some one paint her sometime as Summer, drowsy and golden, passing through fields of August, holding close to her rich warm body the tall sheaves of her golden fruitful corn. And again the firelight crept close to him, and under its touch all his senses stirred like leaves in light wind, glad to be hurt with firelight and then left soothed and heavy and warm.
ONLY now he had a charm against what the firelight meant—what it had been meaning more and more these last few weeks with Rose Severance. It was not a very powerful-looking charm—a dozen lines of a letter from Elinor Piper asking him to come to Southampton, but it began “Dear Ted” and ended “Elinor” and he thought it would serve.
That ought to be enough—that small thing only magical from what you made it mean against what it really was—that wish that nobody could even nickname hope—to keep you cool against the waves of firelight that rose over you like the scent of a harvest meadow. It was, almost.
Rose had been telling him how unhappy she was all evening. Not whiningly—and not, as he remembered later, with any specific details—but in a way that made him feel as if he, as part of the world that had hurt her, was partly responsible. And to want exceedingly to help. And then the only way he could think of helping was to put himself like kindling into the firelight, and he mustn't do that. “Elinor,” he said under his breath like an exorcism, but Rose was very breathing and good to look at and in the next chair.
His fingers took a long time getting his watch.
“I've got to go, Rose, really.”
“Must you? What's the time—eleven?—why heavens, I've kept you here ages, haven't I, and done nothing but moan about my troubles all the time.”
“You know I liked it.” Ted's voice was curiously, boyishly honest in a way he hated but a way that was one of Rose's reasons why he was here with her.
“Well, come again,” she said frankly. “It was fun. I loved it.”
“I will—Lord knows I thank you enough—after 252A Madison Avenue it was simply perfect. And Rose—”
“Well?”
“I'm awful damn sorry. I wish I could help.”
He thought she was going to laugh. Instead she turned perfectly grave.
“I wish you could, Ted.”
They shook hands—it seemed to Ted with a good deal of effort to do only that. Then they stood looking at each other.
There was so little between them—only a charm that nobody could say was even partly real—but somewhere in Ted's brain it said “Elinor” and he managed to shake hands again and get out of the door.
Mrs. Severance waited several minutes, listening, a faint smile curling her mouth with intentness and satisfaction. No, this time he wouldn't come back—nor next time, maybe—but there would be other times—
Then she went into the pantry and started heating water for the dishes that she had explained reassuringly to Ted they were leaving for Elizabeth. There was no need at all of Elizabeth's knowing any more than was absolutely necessary.
MR. Severance—the courtesy title at least is due him—seems to be a man with quite a number of costly possessions. At least here he is with another house, a dinner-table, servants, guests, another Mrs. Severance or somebody who seems to fill her place very adequately at the opposite end of the table, all as if Rose and the Riverside Drive apartment and reading Dickens aloud were only parts of a doll-house kept in one locked drawer of his desk.
The dinner is flawless, the guests importantly jeweled or stomached, depending on their sex, Mrs. Severance an admirable hostess—and yet in spite of it all, Mr. Severance does not seem to be enjoying himself as he should. But this may be due to a sort of minstrel give-and-take of dialogue that keeps going on between what he says for publication and what he thinks.
“Well, Frazee, I'll be ready to go into that loan matter with you inside of a month,” says his voice, and his mind, “Frazee, you slippery old burglar, it won't be a month before you'll be spreading the news that my disappearance means suicide and that the Commercial is rotten, lock, stock and barrel.”
“Yes, dear,” in answer to a relayed query from the other Mrs, Severance. “The children took the small car to the dance.”
“And, Mary, if they'd ever been our children instead of your keeping them always yours, there wouldn't be that little surprise in store for you that I've arranged.”
“Cigar, Winthrop?
“Better take two, my friend—they won't be as good after Mary has charge of that end of the house.”
So it goes—until Mr. Severance has dined very well indeed. And yet Winthrop, chatting with Frazee, just before they go out of the door, finds it necessary to whisper to him for some reason—half a dozen words under cover of a discussion of what the Shipping Board's new move will mean to the mercantile marine. “I told you so, George. See his hands? The old boy's failing.”
THE fourth meal is Nancy's and it doesn't seem very happy. Finally it is over and Mr. Ellicott has rustled himself away from intrusion behind the evening paper.
“Nobody—phoned to-day—did they, mother?”
“No, dear.” The voice is not as easy as it might be, but Nancy does not notice.
“Oh.”
Nor does Nancy notice how hurriedly her mother's next question comes.
“Did you see Mrs. Winters, darling?”
“Oh yes—I saw her.”
“And you're going on to New York?”
“Yes—next week, I think.”
“With her. And going to stay with her?”
“I suppose so.”
Mrs. Ellicott sighs relievedly.
“That's so nice.”
Nancy will be safe now—as safe as if she were under an anesthetic. Mrs, Winters will take care of that. She must have a little talk with dear Isabella Winters.
But that night Nancy is alone in her room—doing up her engagement ring and Louis' letters in a wobbly package. She is not quite just, though; she keeps one letter—the first.
MARGARET Crowe, who, having just come to her seventeenth birthday in this present day and generation, felt it her official family duty to season the general conversation with an appropriate pepper of heartlessness, had really put it very well. She had said that while she didn't suppose one house-party over Labor Day would more than partially rivet a broken heart, it honestly was a relief for everybody else to get Louis out of the house for a while and mother needn't look at her that way because she was as sorry as any of the rest of them for poor old Louis, but when people went about like walking cadavers and nearly bit you every time you mentioned anything that had to do with marriage, it was time they went somewhere else for a while and stayed there till they got over it.
And Mrs. Crowe, though dutifully rebuking her for her flippant treatment of a brother's pain, agreed with the sense of her remarks if not with the wording. It had taken a good deal of quiet obstinacy on the part of the whole family to get Louis to accept Peter Piper's invitation—Mrs. Crowe, who was understanding, knew at what cost—the cost of a man who has lost a hand's first appearance in company with the stump unbandaged—but anything would be better than the mopey Louis of the last two weeks and a half, and Mrs. Crowe had been taught by a good deal of living the aseptic powers of having to go through the motions of ordinary life in front of a casual audience, even when it seemed that those motions were no longer of any account. So Louis took clean flannels and a bitter mind to Southampton on the last day of August, and, as soon as he got off the train, was swung into a Virginia reel of consecutive amusements that, fortunately, allowed him little time to think.
When he did, it was only to wonder rather frigidly if this fellow with glasses who played tennis and danced and swam and watched and commented athletically on the Davis Cup finals, sitting between Elinor Piper and Juliet Bellamy whom he had taken to dances off and on ever since he had had his first pair of pumps, could really be he. The two people didn't feel in the least the same.
The two Mr. Crowes, he thought. “Mr. Louis Crowe—meet Mr. Louis Crowe. On our right, ladies and gentlemen, we have one of the country's greatest curiosities—a young gentleman who insists upon going on existing when there is nothing at all that makes his existence useful or interesting or proud. A very realistic wax figure that will toddle, talk small talk and play almost any sort of game until you might easily believe it to be genuinely alive. Mr. Louis Crowe.
The house-party was to last a week, except for Ted Billett who would have to go back after Labor Day—and before eight hours of it were over, Louis was watching Ted with grandmotherly interest, a little mordant jealousy, and humor, that, at times, verged toward the hysterical. Nancy—and especially the loss of her—had made him as sensitive as a skinless man to the winds and vagaries of other young people in love—and while Ted could look at and talk with Elinor Piper and think himself as safe as a turtle under its shell from the observations and discoveries of the rest of the party, he could no more hide himself or his intentions from Louis' painful scrutiny than he could have hid the fact that he had suddenly turned bright green. So Louis, a little with the sense of his own extreme generosity, but sincerely enough in the main, began to play kind shepherd, confidant, referee and second-between-the-rounds to Ted's as yet quite unexpressed strivings—and since most of him was only too willing to busy itself with anything but reminiscences of Nancy, he began to congratulate himself shortly that under his entirely unacknowledged guidance things really seemed to be getting along very well.
AND here, too, his streak of ineradicable humor—that bright plaything made out of knives that is so fine to juggle with light-handedly until the hand meets it in its descent a fraction of a second too soon came often and singularly to his aid. He could see himself in a property white beard stretching feeble hands in blessing over a kneeling and respectful Elinor and Ted. “Bless you, my dear, dear children—for though my own happiness has gone with yesteryear, at least I have made you—find each other—and perhaps, when you sit at evening among the happy shouts of your posterity” but here Louis broke off into a snort of laughter. That was really starting to carry matters along a little too fast.
Of course, Ted had confided nothing formally as yet—but then, thought Louis sourly out of his own experience, he wouldn't; that was the way you always felt; and Ted had never been a person of easy confidences. The most he had done had been to take Louis grimly aside from the dance they had gone to last night and explain in one ferocious and muffled sentence, delivered half at Louis and half at a large tree, that if Hinky Selvage didn't stop dancing with Elinor that way he, Ted, would carry him unobtrusively behind a bush and force him to swallow most of his own front teeth. And again Louis, looking back as a man might to the feverish details of a major operation, realized with cynic mirth that that was a very favorable symptom indeed. Oh, everything was going along simply finely for Ted, if the poor fool only knew it. But that he would no more believe, of course, than you would a dentist who told you he wasn't going to hurt. People in love were poor fools—damn fools—unutterably lucky, unutterably perfect fools.
Ted and Louis must have one talk, though, before it all happened beyond redemption, and Ted started wearing that beautiful anesthetized smile and began to concoct small kindly fatal conspiracies with Elinor about Louis and some nice girl. They hadn't had a real chance to talk since Louis came back from St. Louis, and shortly—oh, very shortly indeed by the way things looked—the only thing they would be able to talk about would be Elinor and how wonderful she and requited love and young happy marriage were—and however glad Louis might be for Ted and his luck he really wouldn't be able to stand that, under the present circumstances, for very long at a time. Ted would be gone into fortune—into a fortune that Louis would be the last person on earth to grudge him—but that meant the end of eight years of fighting, mockery, and friendship together as surely as if those years were marbles and Elinor were dropping them down a well. They could pick it up later—after Ted had been married a year say—but it would have changed then, it wouldn't be the same.
Louis smiled rather wryly. He wondered if that was at all like what Ted might have thought when he and Nancy—but that wasn't comparable in the least. But Nancy and he were different. Nancy—and with that, the pain came so dazzlingly for a minute that Louis had to shut his eyes to bear it—and something that wasn't just stupidly rude had to be said to Juliet Bellamy in answer to her loud clear question as to whether he was falling asleep.
ALL up to and through Labor Day Louis bluffed and maneuvered like the head of a small but vicious Balkan State in an International Congress for Ted and Elinor and toward tea-time decided sardonically that it was quite time his adopted infants took any further responsibilities off his shoulders. There was no use delaying conclusions any longer—Louis felt as he looked at his victims like a workmanlike god who simply must finish the rough draft of the particular world he is moiling with before sunset in spite of any or all rebellious or slipshod qualities in its clay. There would be a dance that evening. There would be, Louis thought with some proprietary pride, a large and sentimental moon. A few craftily casual words with Elinor before dinner—a real talk with Ted in one of the intermissions of the dance—a watch-dog efficiency in guarding the two from intrusion while they got the business over with neatly in any one of several very suitable spots that Louis had picked out already in his mind's eye. And then, having thoroughly settled Ted for the rest of his years in such a solid and satisfactory way—perhaps the queer gods that had everyone in charge, in spite of their fatal leaning toward practical joking where the literary were concerned, might find enough applause in their little tin hearts for Louis' acquired and vicarious merit to give him in some strange and painful way another chance to be alive again and not merely the present wandering specter-of-body that people who knew nothing about it seemed to take so unreasonably for Louis Crowe.
So he laid his snares, feeling quite like Nimrod the mighty, though outwardly he was only kneeling on the Piper porch, waiting for the dice to come round to him in a vociferous game of craps that Juliet had organized—he seldom shot without winning now, he noticed with superstitious awe. And tea passed to a sound of muffled crumpets, and every one went up to dress for dinner.
MRS. Winters' little apartment is on West Seventy-ninth Street—she heads letters from it playfully “The Hen Coop” for there is almost always some member of her own sex doing time with the generous Mrs. Winters. Mrs. Winters is quite celebrated in St. Louis for her personally-conducted tours of New York with stout Middle-Western matrons or spectacled schoolgirls east for visits and clothes—Mrs. Winters has the perfectly varnished manners, the lust for retailing unimportant statistics and the supercilious fixed smile of a professional guide. Mrs. Winters' little apartment, that all the friends who come to her to be fed and bedded and patronized tell her is so charmingly New Yorky because of the dear little kitchenette with the asthmatic gas-plates, the imitation English plate-rail around the dining-room wall, the bookcase with real books—a countable number of them—and on top of it the genuine signed photograph of Caruso for which Mrs. Winters paid the sum she always makes you guess about at a charity bazaar.
Mrs. Winters herself—the Mrs. Winters who is so interested in young people as long as they will do exactly what she wants them to—every inch of her, from her waved white hair to the black jet spangles on her dinner gown or the notes of her “cultivated” voice, as frosted and correct artificial as a piece of glacé fruit. And with her, Nancy, dressed for dinner too, because Mrs. Winters feels it to be one's duty to oneself to dress for dinner always, no matter how much one's guests may wish to relax—Nancy as much out of place in the apartment whose very cushion seem to smell of that modern old-maidishness that takes itself for superior feminist virtue as a crocus would be in an exhibition of wool flowers—a Nancy who doesn't talk much and has faint blue stains under her eyes.
“So everything went very satisfactorily indeed to-day, dear Nancy?”
Mrs. Winters' voice implies the uselessness of the question. Nancy is staying with Mrs. Winters—it would be very strange indeed if even the least important accompaniments of such a visit were not of the most satisfactory kind.
“Yes, Mrs. Winters. Nothing particularly happened, that is—but they like my work.”
“Yes, dear,” Mrs. Winters croons at her; she is being motherly. The effect produced is rather that of a sudden assumption of life and vicarious motherhood on the part of a small, brightly-painted porcelain hen.
“Then they will be sending you over shortly, no doubt? Across the wide, wide sea—” adds Mrs. Winters archly, but Nancy is too tired to respond to the fancy.
“I suppose they will when they get ready,” she answers briefly and returns to her chicken croquette with the thought that in its sleekness, genteelness, crumblingness, and generally unnourishing qualities it is rather like Mrs. Winters. An immense desire, after two weeks of Mrs. Winters' mental and physical cuisine, for something as hearty and gross as the mere sight of a double planked steak possesses her achingly—but Mrs. Winters was told once that she “ate like a bird.”
“Well, in that case, dear Nancy, you certainly must not leave New York indefinitely without making the most of your opportunities,” Mrs. Winters' tones are full of genteel decision. “I have made out a little list, dear Nancy, of some things which I thought, in my funny old way, might possibly be worth your while. We will talk it over after dinner, if you like—”
“Thank you so much, dear Mrs. Winters,” says Nancy with dutiful hopelessness. She is only too well acquainted with Mrs. Winters' little lists.
“As an artist, as an artist, dear Nancy, especially,” Mrs. Winters breathes somewhat heavily, “Things That Should Interest You. Nothing Bizarre, you understand, Nothing Merely Freakish—but some of the Things in New York that I, Personally, have found Worth While.”
THE Things that Mrs. Winters Has Found Personally Worth While include a great many public monuments. She will give Nancy a similar list of Things Worth While in Paris, too, before Nancy sails—and Nancy smiles acceptably as each one of them is mentioned.
Only Mrs. Winters cannot see what Nancy is thinking—for if she could she might become startlingly human at once, as even the most perfectly poised of females is apt to do when she finds a rat in the middle of her neat white bed. For Nancy is thinking quite freely of various quaint and everlasting places of torment that might very well be devised for Mrs. Winters—and of the naked fact that once arrived in Paris it will matter very little to anybody what becomes of her and least of all to herself—and that Mrs. Winters doesn't know that she saw a chance mention of Mr. Louis Crowe, the author of “Dancer's Holiday,” to-day in the Bookman and that she cut it out because it had Louis' name in it and that it is now in the smallest pocket of her bag with his creased and recreased first letter and the lucky piece she had from her nicest uncle and a little dim photograph of Mr. Ellicott and half a dozen other small precious childish things.
THE dance is at the Pipers' this time—the last Piper dance of the Southampton season and the biggest—other people may give dances after it but everybody who knows will only think of them as relatively pleasant or useless addenda. The last Piper dance has been the official period to the Southampton summer ever since Elinor's début—and this time the period is sure to be bigger and rounder than ever, since it closes the most successful season Southampton has ever had.
Nothing very original about its being a masquerade, from Mr. Piper a courteously gray-haired mandarin in jade-green robes beside Mrs. Piper—lovely Mary Embree that was—in the silks of a Chinese empress, heavy and shining and crusted as the wings of a jeweler's butterfly, her reticent eye watching the bright broken patterns of the dancing as impassively as if she were viewing men being tortured or invested with honor from the Dragon Throne, to Louis, a diffident Pierrot who has discovered no even bearably comfortable way of combining spectacles and a mask, and Peter who is gradually turning purple under the fur of a dancing bear. Nothing much out of the ordinary in the tunes and the three orchestras and the fact that a dozen gentlemen dressed as the Devil are finding their tails very inconvenient as regards the shimmy, and a dozen Joan of Arcs are eying each other with looks of dumb hatred whenever they pass. Nothing singular about the light heart throb of the music, the smell of powder and scent and heat and flowers, the whole loose drifting garland of the dancers, blowing over and around the floor in the idle designs of sand floating like scraps of colored paper through a smooth wind heavy with music as the hours run away like light water through the fingers. But outside the house the Italian gardens are open, little lanterns spot them like elf-lights, shining on hedge-green, pale marble; the night is pallid with near and crowded stars, the air warm as summer water, sweet as dear youth.
The unmasking is to take place at midnight and it is past eleven when Louis drops back into the stag line after being stuck for a dance and a half with a leaden-footed human flower-basket who devoted the entire time to nervous giggles and the single coy statement that she just knew he never could guess who she was but she recognized him perfectly. He starts looking around for Ted. There he is, scanning the clown's parade with the eyes of an anxious hawk, disgruntled nervousness plain in every line of his body. Then Louis remembers that he saw a slim Chinese girl in loose blue silks go off the floor ten minutes or so ago with a tall musketeer. He goes over and touches Ted on a parti-colored arm—the latter is dressed as a red and gilt harlequin—and feels the muscle he touches twitch under his hand.
“Cigaret? It's getting hotter than cotton in here—they'll have to open more windows—”
“What?” Then recognizing voice and glasses, “Oh, yeah—guess so—awful mob isn't it?” and they thread their way out into the cool.
They wander down from the porch and into the gardens, past benches where the talk that is going on seems to be chiefly in throaty undertones and halts nervously as their steps crunch past.
“This side of Paradise next stop!” says Louis amusedly, then a little louder, “Amusez-vous bien, mes enfants,” at a small and carefully modulated shriek that comes from the other side of the low hedge. “The night's still young. But Good Lord, isn't there any place in the whole works where two respectable people can sit without feeling like chaperons?”
They find one finally—it is at the far end of the gardens—a seat the only reason for whose obvious desertion seems to be, comments Louis, that some untactful person has strung a dim but still perfectly visible lantern directly above it—and relapse upon it silently. It is not until the first cigarets of both are little red dying stars on the grass beside them that either really starts to talk.
“Cool,” says Louis, stretching his arms. The night lies over them light as spray—a great swimming bath and quietness of soft black, hushed silver—above them the whole radiant helmet of heaven is white as milk with its stars. From the house they have left, glowing yellow in all its windows, unreal against the night as if it were only a huge flat toy made out of paper with a candle burning behind it, comes music, blurred but insistent, faint as if heard over water, dull and throbbing like horse-hoofs muffled with leather treading a lonely road.
“Um. Good party.”
“Real Piper party, Ted. And, speaking of Pipers, friend Peter certainly seems to be enjoying himself—”
“Really?”
“Third bench on the left as we came down. Never go to a costume-party dressed as a dancing bear if you want to get any quiet work in on the side. Rule One of Crowe's Social Code for Our Own First Families.”
Ted chuckles uneasily and there 1s silence for another while as they smoke. Both are in very real need of talking each other but each must feel his way a little carefully because they are friends. Then:
“I,” says Ted and,
“You,” says Louis, simultaneously. Both laugh and the little tension that has grown up between them snaps at once.
“I suppose you know that Nancy's and my engagement went bust about three weeks ago,” begins Louis with elaborate calm, his eyes fixed on his shoes.
Ted clears his throat.
“Didn't know. Afraid it was something like that, though—way you were looking,” he says, putting his words one after the other, as slowly as if he were building with children's blocks—theirs has never been a friendship of easy emotion. “What was it? Don't tell me unless you want to, of course—you know—"
“Want to, rather.” Ted knows that he is smiling, and how, though he is not looking at his face. “After all—old friends, all that. My dear old college chum,” but the mockery breaks down. “My fault, I guess,” he says in a voice like metal.
“It was, Ted. Acted like a fool. And then, this waiting business—not much use going over that, now. But it's broken. Got my—property—such as it was, all back in a neat little parcel two weeks ago. That's why I quit friend Vanamee—you ought to have known from that.”
“Did, I suppose, only I hoped it wasn't. I'm damn sorry, Louis.”
“Thanks, Ted.”
THEY shake hands, but not theatrically.
“Oh well—oh hell—oh dammit, you know how blasted sorry I am. That's all I can say, I guess—”
“Well, so am I. And it was my fault, chiefly. And that's all I can say.”
“Look here, though.” Ted's voice is doing its best to be logical in spite of the fact that two things, the fact that he unutterably sorry for Louis and the fact that he mustn't show it in silly ways, are fighting in him like wrestlers. “Are you sure it's as bad as all that? I mean girls—” Ted flounders hopelessly between his eagerness to help and his knowledge that it will take ungodly tact. “I mean, Nancy's different all right—but they change their minds—and then they come around—and—”
Louis spreads out his hands. It is somehow queerly comforting not to let himself be comforted in any degree.
“What's the use? Tried to explain—got her mother—Nancy was out but she certainly left a message—easier if we never saw each other again—well—then she sent back everything—she knew I'd try to phone her—tried to explain—never a word since then except my name and address on the package—oh, it's over, Ted. Feenee. But it's pretty well smashed me. For the present, at least.”
“But if you started it,” Ted says stubbornly.
“Oh, I did, of course—gentlemanly supposition anyhow—that's why—don't you see?”
“Can't say I do exactly.”
“Well?”
“Well?”
“We're both of us too proud, Ted. And too poor. And starting again—can't you—visualize—it wouldn't be the way it was—only both of us thinking about that all the time—and still we couldn't get married. I've got less right than ever, now—oh, but how could we after what we've said—" and this time his voice has lost all the attitudes of youth, it is singularly older and seems to come from the center of a place full of pain.
“I wish I could help, though, Caw. You know,” says Ted. The nickname is a discarded one from Freshman year and the time when neither had quite grown up into the full Anglo-Saxon tradition of trying to conceal any genuine partiality for one's particular friends, as if it were a peculiarly sentimental species of crime.
“Wish you could.” Then later, “Thanks.”
“Welcome.”
BOTH smoke and are silent for a time, remembering small things out of the last eight years.
“But what are you going to do, Louis, now you've kissed the great god Advertising a fond good-by?”
Louis stirs uneasily.
“Dunno—exactly. I told you about those two short stories Easten wanted me to take out of my novel? Well, I've done it and sent 'em in—and he'll buy 'em all right.”
“That's fine!”
“It's a little money, anyhow. And then—remember Dick Lamoureux?”
"Yes."
“Got a letter from him right after—I came back from St. Louis. Well, he's got a big job with the American Express in Paris—European Advertising Manager or something like that—he's been crazy to have either of us come over ever since that idea of the three of us getting an apartment on the Rive Gauche fell through. Well, he says, if I can come over, he'll get me some sort of a job—not much to go on at first, but they want people who are willing to stay—enough to live on anyway—I want to get out of the country, Ted.”
“Should think you. Good Lord—Paris! Why, you lucky, lucky Indian!” says Ted affectionately. “When'll you leave?”
“Don't know. He said cable him if I really decided—think I will They need men and I can get a fair enough letter from Vanamee. I've been thinking it over ever since the letter came—wondering if I'd take it. Think I will now. Well.”
“Well, I wish I was going along, Caw.”
And this time Louis is really able to smile.
“No, you don't.”
Oh, well—but, honestly—well, no I suppose I don't. And I suppose that's something you know all about, too, you—private detective!”
“Private detective! Why, you poor ass if you haven't noticed how I've been playing godmother to you all the way through this house-party”
“I have. I suppose I'd thank anybody else. Coming from you, though, I can only say that such was both my hope and my expectation.”
Oh, you perfect ass!” Both laugh, a little unsteadily.
“Well, Louis, what think?” says Ted, finding some difficulty with his words for some reason or other.
“Think? Can't tell, my amorous child. Coldly considered, I think you've the heck of a good chance—and I'm very strong for it, needless to say—and if you don't go and put it over pretty soon I'll be intensely annoyed—one of the pleasures I've promised myself for years and years has been getting most disgracefully oiled at your wedding, Ted.”
“Well, to-night is going to be zero hour, I think,” Ted proceeds with a try at being flippant and Louis cackles with mirth.
“I knew it. I knew it. Old Uncle Louis, the Young Proposer's Guide and Pocket Companion.” Then his voice changes. “Luck,” he says briefly.
“Thanks. Need it.”
“Of course I'm not worthy,” Ted begins diffidently but Louis stops him.
“They never are. I wasn't. But that doesn't make any difference. You've got to—n'est-ce pas?”
“You devil! Yes. But when I think of it—”
“Don't!”
“But leaving out everything else—it seems so cheeky! When Elinor's got everything, including all the money in the world, and I—”
“We talked that over a long time ago, remember? And remember what we decided—that it didn't matter, in this year and world at least. Of course I'm assuming that you're really in love with her—”
“I am,” from Ted very soberly. “Oh, I am, all right.”
“Well then, go ahead. And, Theodore, I shall watch your antic motions with the greatest sarcastic delight, both now and in the future—either way it breaks. Moreover, I'll take anybody out of the action that you don't want around—and if there were anything else I could do—”
“Got to win off my own service,” says Ted. “You know. But thanks all the same. Only when I think of—some incidents of Paris—and how awful near I've come to making a complete fool of myself with that Severance woman in the last month—well—”
“Look here, Ted.” Louis is really worried. “You're not going to let that—interfere—are you? Right now?”
“I've got to tell her.” Ted's smile is a trifle painful. “Got to, you know. Oh, not that. But France. The whole business.”
“But good heavens, man, you aren't going to make it the start of the conversation?”
“Well—maybe not, But it's all got to be—explained. Only way I'll ever feel decent—and I don't suppose I'll feel too decent then.”
“But Ted—oh, it's your game, of course. Only I don't think it's being—fair—to either of you to tell her just now.”
“Can't help it, Louis.” Ted's face sets into what Louis once christened his “mule-look.” “I've thought it over backwards and sideways and all around the block—and I can't squirm out of it because it'll be—incredibly hard to do. As a mater of fact,” he pauses, “it'll tell itself, you know, probably,” he ends, more prophetically than he would probably care to know.
“Well, I simply don't see—”
“Must,” after that Louis knows there is very little good of arguing the point much further. He has not known Ted for eight years without finding out that a certain bitter and Calvinistic penchant for self-crucifixion is one of his ruling forces—and one of those least easily deduced from his externals. Still, he makes a last effort.
“Now, don't start getting all tied up about that. Keep your mind on Elinor.”
“That's not—hard.”
“Good—I see that you have all the proper reactions. And you'll excuse me for saying that I don't think she's too good you—and even if she were she'd have to marry somebody, you know—and when you put it, put it straight, and let Paris and everything else you're worrying about go plumb to the ash-can! And that's good advice.”
“I know it. I'll tell you, of course.”
“Well, I should think you would!”
Louis looks at his watch.
“Great Scott—they'll be unmasking in twenty minutes. And I've got to go back and cut Juliet out of the herd and take her to supper—”
They rise and look at each other. Then,
“Hope this is the last time, Ted, old fel—which isn't any reflection on the last eight years or so,” says Louis slowly, and their hands grip once and hard. Then they both start talking fast as they walk back to the house to cover the unworthy emotion. But just as they are going in the door, Louis hisses into Ted's ear, an advisory whisper.
“Now go and eat all the supper you can, you idiot—it always helps.
(To be continued in the August issue)