298
FLAMING
YOUTH
wrecked and the life so triumphantly burgeoning. Every morning after breakfast Pat called him on the phone and every noon she came over for an hour’s chat, until Dee, grateful beyond her self-contained power to express,
threatened to sue her sister for alienation of her husband’s affections. = Nothing, of however much appeal to Pat, was permit ted to interfere with this regimen. Through this it was that she had her quarrel with Monty Standish. After three years of hard-working athletic obscurity, Standish had suddenly blossomed out into flaming football prominence. His picture appeared in the sporting pages of the metropolitan dailies; his condition was the subject of commentary in the papers, as serious as that accorded to an ailing king. He was of a gallant and alluring type, a bonny lad, handsome, spirited, goodhumoured, well-mannered, sluggish of mind as he was alert of body, but with a magnetism almost as imperative as Pat’s own. He had quite withheld his homage from her, ostentatiously refusing to compete in the circle of her adorers, so she was the more surprised and gratified when he asked her to join his sister’s party for the big game. It cost her a real pang to decline, but when he hotly resented her refusal and demanded an explanation— he was rather spoiled by all the local adulation and newspaper notoriety which were the guerdon of his prowess— Pat declined to be catechised. There was a scene, angry on his part, scornful on hers, and he departed, darkly indicating that if Princeton lost the game on his side of the line the true responsibility for the catastrophe would test upon her contemptuous shoulders. How T. Jameson James got wind of the controversy she never knew, but on the day of the game he called her to account,
