Green rescued George when his head was drooping and his eyes blurred. He got him to the gymnasium and stretched him out there and set the doctors to work on his head.
A voice got into George's brain. Who was talking? Was it Goodhue, or Stringham?
"I guess you can see him, but he's pretty vague. Played the whole game with a broken head. Lied to the doctors."
George forced his eyes open. Lambert Planter, still in his stained football clothes, bent over him.
"Hello, Planter!"
Lambert grasped the black hand.
"Hello, George Morton!"
That was all. Lambert went away, but George knew that what he had really said was:
"It's only what you've made of yourself that counts."
At Princeton they kept him in the infirmary for a few days, but he didn't like it. It filled him with a growing fear. Since it made no particular difference now how long he was ill, they let him see too many callers. He distrusted hero worship. Most of all was he afraid when such devotion came from Betty.
"Being a vicarious hero," Mrs. Bailly said, "has made my husband the happiest man in Princeton."
After that she didn't enter the conversation much, and again George sensed, with a reluctant thrill, a maternal caring in her heart for him.
"You never ought to have gone back in the second half," Betty said.
"If I hadn't," he laughed, "who would have taken care of Lambert Planter for you?"
"Squibs says you might have been killed."
"He's a great romancer," George exploded.
"Just the same, it was splendid of you to play at all."
She touched the white bandage about his head.
"Does it hurt a great deal?"
"No," he said, nearly honestly. "I only let them keep me here to cut some dull lectures."
He glanced at Betty wistfully.
"Did I take care of Lambert Planter as you wanted?"
She glanced away.
"Are you punishing me? Haven't you read the papers? You outplayed him and every man on the field."
"That was what you wished?"
She turned back with an assumption of impatience.
"What do you mean?"
He couldn't tell her. He couldn't probe further into her feelings for Lambert, her attitude toward himself. He had to get his mind in hand again.
Betty brought her mother one day. Mrs. Alston was full of praise, but she exuded an imperial distaste for his sick-room. Both times he had to overcome an impulse to beg Betty not to go so soon. That more than anything else made him afraid of himself. It was, he felt, an excellent change to escape to an active life.
Blodgett's place gave him a massive, tasteless welcome. It was one of those houses with high, sloping roofs, numerous chimneys, and much sculptured stone, slightly reminiscent of Mansart, and enormously suggestive of that greatest architect of all, the big round dollar. In its grounds it fitted like a huge diamond on a flowered shirt-front. There were terraces; and a sunken garden, a little self-conscious with coy replicas of regency sculpture; and formal walks between carefully barbered trees and hedges. It convinced George that his original choice of three necessities had been wise. Blodgett had the money, but he didn't have Squibs Bailly and Goodhue or the things they personified. And how Blodgett coveted The Goodhue Quality! George told himself that was why he had been asked, because he was so close to Goodhue. But Blodgett let him see that there was another motive. After those games George was temporarily one of the nation's famous men.
It wasn't until he had arrived that George understood how near Blodgett's place was to Oakmont—not more than fifteen miles. He was interested, but he had no idea, even if the Planters were there for Thanksgiving, that he would see any of them.
At Blodgett's bachelor enormity people came and went. At times the huge, over-decorated rooms were filled, yet to George they seemed depressingly empty because he knew they didn't enclose the men and the women Blodgett wanted. Mr. and Mrs. Sinclair, indeed, motored out for Thanksgiving dinner—a reluctant concession, George gathered, to a profitable partnership. Blodgett brought him forth as a specimen, and the specimen impressed, for it isn't given to everyone to sit down at the close of the season with the year's most famous football player. It puzzled George that in the precious qualities he craved he knew himself superior to everyone in the house except these two who made him feel depressingly inferior. Would he some day reach the point where he would react unconsciously, as they did, to every social emergency?
When the dinner party had scattered, Blodgett and he walked alone on the terrace in an ashen twilight. There the surprise was sprung. It was clearly no surprise to his host, who beamed at George, pointing to the drive.
"I 'phoned him he would find an old football friend here if he'd take the trouble to drive over."
"But you didn't tell him my name?" George gasped.
"No, but why——"
Blodgett broke off and hurried his heavy body to the terrace edge to greet these important arrivals.
Lambert sprang from the runabout he had driven up and helped Sylvia down. She was bundled in becoming furs. The sharp air had heightened her rich colouring. How beautiful she was—lovelier than George had remembered! Here was the tonic to kill the distracting doubts raised by Betty. Here was the very spring of his wilful ambition. Glancing at Sylvia, Betty's tranquil influence lost its power.
At her first recognition of him she stopped abruptly, but Lambert ran across and grasped his hand.
"How do, Morton. Never guessed Blodgett's message referred to you."
George disapproved of Blodgett's methods. Why had the man made him a mystery at the very moment he used him as a bait to attract Lambert and Sylvia? Wasn't he important enough, or was it only because he was a Princeton man and Blodgett had feared some enmity might linger?
Lambert's manner, at least, was proof that he had, indeed, meant to give George a message that night in the dressing-room at New Haven. George appreciated that "How do, Morton"—greeting at last of a man for a man instead of a man for a servant or a former servant; nor was Lambert's call to his sister without a significance nearly sharp enough to hurt.
"Sylvia! Didn't you meet this strong-armed Princetonian at Betty's dance a year ago?"
George understood that she had no such motives as Lambert's for altering her attitude, so much more uncompromising from the beginning than his. There had been no contact or shared pain. Only what she might have observed from a remote stand that Saturday could have affected her. How would she respond now?
She advanced slowly, at first bewildered, then angry. But Blodgett had nothing but his money to recommend him to her. She wouldn't, George was certain, bare any intimacies of emotion before him.
"I rather think I did."
In her eyes George recognized the challenge he had last seen there.
"Thanks for remembering me," he said rather in Wandel's manner.
"A week ago Saturday——" she began, uncertainly, as though her remembering needed an apology.
"Who could forget the great Morton?" Lambert laughed. "With a broken head he beat Yale. That was a hard game to lose."
"I'd heard," she said, indifferently, "that you had been hurt."
George would have preferred words as ugly and unforgettable as those she had attacked him with the day of her accident. She turned to Blodgett. George had an instinct to shake her as she chatted easily and casually, glancing at him from time to time. He could have borne it better if she hadn't included him at all.
He was glad her brother occupied him. Lambert was for dissecting each play of the game, and he made no attempt to hide the admiration for George it had aroused. He gave the impression that he knew very well men didn't do such things—particularly that little trick with Goodhue—unless they were the right sort.
Blodgett said something about tea. They strolled into the house. A fire burned in the great hall. That was the only light. George came last, directly after Sylvia.
"So you're a friend of Mr. Blodgett's!" she said with an intonation intended to hurt.
"I wouldn't have expected," he answered, easily, "to find you a caller here."
She paused and faced him. Lights from the distant fire got as far as her face, disclosing her contempt. He wouldn't let her speak.
"I won't have you think I had anything to do with bringing you. I never guessed until I saw your brother drive up."
She didn't believe him, or she tried to impress him with that affront. Blodgett and Lambert had gone on into the library. They remained quite alone in the huge, dusky hall, whose shadow masses shifted as the fire blazed and fell. For the first time since their ancient rides he could talk to her undisturbed. He wouldn't let that fact tie his tongue. She couldn't call him "stable boy" now, although she did try to say "beast" in another way. This solitude in the dusk, shared with her, stripped every distracting thought from his mind. He was as hard as steel and happy in his inflexibility.
"You believe me," he said.
She shook her head and turned for the door.
"Let me say one thing," he urged. "It's rather important."
She came back through the shadows, her attitude reminiscent of the one she had assumed long ago when she had sought to hurt him. He caught his breath, waiting.
"There is nothing," she said, shivering a little in spite of the hall's warmth and the furs she still wore, "that you would think of saying to me if you had changed at all from the impertinent groom I had to have discharged."
He laughed.
"Oh! Call me anything you please, only I've always wanted to thank you for not making a scene at Miss Alston's dance a year ago."
He would be disappointed if that failed to hurt back. The thought of Sylvia Planter making a scene! At least it fanned her temper.
"What is there," she threatened, defensively, "to prevent my telling Mr. Blodgett, any one I please, now?"
"Nothing, except that I'm a trifle more on my feet," he answered. "I'm not sure your scandal would blow me over. We're going to meet again frequently. It can't he helped."
"I never want," she said, as if speaking of something unclean and revolting, "to see you again."
His chance had come.
"You're unfair, because it was you yourself, Miss Planter, who warned me I shouldn't forget. I haven't. I won't. Will you? Can't we shake hands on that understanding?"
With a hurried movement she hid her hands.
"I couldn't touch you——"
"You will when we dance."
He thought her lips trembled a little, but the light was uncertain.
"I will never dance with you again."
"I'm afraid you'll have to," he said with a confident smile, "unless you care to make a scene."
She drew away, unfastening her cloak, her eyes full of that old challenge.
"You're impossible," she whispered. "Can't you understand that I dislike you?"
His heart leapt, for didn't he hate her?
Lambert appeared in the doorway.
"Blodgett's rung for tea——"
He glanced curiously from one to the other. The broken shadows disclosed little, but the fact that she had lingered at all was arresting.
"What's up, Sylvia?"
She went close to her brother.
"This—this old servant has been impertinent again."
Lambert smiled.
"He's rather more than that now, sis. That's over—forgotten. Still if the Princeton fellow Morton's been impertinent——"
He spread his arms, smiling.
"Have I got to submit myself to a trouncing more than once a year?"
Sylvia shrugged her shoulders.
"No," she said, impatiently. "You say it's forgotten. All right."
George knew it would never be forgotten now by either of them. Lambert's unruffled attitude made him uneasy. Her brother's scoffing response to her accusation suggested that Lambert saw, since they would be more or less thrown together, a beneficial side to such encounters as the one just ended. For George didn't dream that Lambert had forgotten, either, those old boasts.
Another depressing thought made him bad company for Blodgett after the callers had driven away. It came from a survey, following his glimpse of Sylvia's beauty, of all the blatant magnificence with which Blodgett had surrounded himself. Blodgett after dinner, a little flushed with wine, and the triumph of having had in his house on the same day two Sinclairs and two Planters, attempted an explanation.
"I didn't build this, Morton, or my place in town, just for Josiah Blodgett."
George wasn't in a mood for subtleties of expression.
"I've often wondered why you haven't married. With your money you ought to have a big choice."
Blodgett sipped a liqueur. He smiled in a self-satisfied way.
"Money will buy about anything—even the kind of a wife you want. I'm in no hurry. When I marry, young man, it will be the right kind."
And George understood that he meant by the right kind some popular and well-bred girl who would make the Blodgett family hit a social average.
He carried that terrifying thought of marriage back to Princeton. He had no fear Sylvia would ever look seriously in Blodgett's direction. Money could scarcely bribe her. This, however, was her second season. Of course she would marry someone of her own immediate circle. She could take her choice. When that happened what would become of his determination and his boasts? Frequently he clenched her riding crop and swore:
"Nothing—not even that—can keep me from accomplishing what I've set out to do. I'll have my way with her."
He shrank, nevertheless, from the thought of her adopting such a defence. It was intolerable. He read the New York papers with growing suspense. As an antidote he attacked harder than ever his study of cause and effect in the Street. With football out of the way he could give a good deal of time to that, and Blodgett now and then enclosed a hint in Mundy's letters. It was possible to send a fair amount of money to his parents; but his mother's letters never varied from their formality of thanks and solicitations as to his health. His father didn't write at all. Of course, they couldn't understand what he was doing. The shadow of the great Planter remained perpetually over their little home.
Another doubt troubled George. With the club matter out of the way, and the presidency of the class his, and a full football garland resting on his head, was he wasting his time at Princeton? The remembrance of Blodgett steadied him. He needed all that Princeton and its companionships could give.
Purposefully he avoided Betty. Was she, indeed, responsible for that softness he had yielded to in the infirmary and during the final game? In his life, he kept telling himself, there was no room for sentiment. Sentiment was childish, a hindrance. Hadn't he decided at the start that nothing should turn him from his attempt for the summit? Still he couldn't avoid seeing Betty now and then in Princeton, or at the dances in New York to which he went with Goodhue. The less he saw of Betty, moreover, the stronger grew his feeling of something essential lacking from his life; and it bothered that, after a long separation, she was invariably friendly instead of reproachful. He found that he couldn't look at her eyes without hungrily trying to picture them wet with tears for him.
To some extent other demands took his mind from such problems. The rumpus Goodhue had foreseen developed. Important men came or wrote from New York or Philadelphia in Dalrymple's cause, but at the meetings of the section George sat obdurate, and, when the struggle approached a crisis, Goodhue came out openly on the side of his room-mate.
"You can have Dalrymple in the club," was George's ultimatum, "or you can have me, but you can't have us both."
If George resigned, Goodhue announced, he would follow. Dalrymple was doomed. The important men went back or ceased writing. Then Wandel slipped Rogers into the charmed circle—the payment of a debt; and George laughed and left the meeting, saying:
"You can elect anybody you please now."
Cynically, he was tempted to try to force Allen in.
"You're not honest even with your own group," he said afterward to Wandel.
The club lost its value as a marker of progress. Besides, he didn't look forward to eating with that little snob, Rogers, for two years. Nor did he quite care for Wandel's reply.
"You've enough class-consciousness for both of us, heroic and puissant Apollo."
For the first time George let himself go with Wandel.
"You'll find Apollo Nemesis, little man, unless you learn to say what you mean in words of one syllable."
And the discussion of the clubs went on, breeding enmities but determining no radical reform.
The struggle at Princeton was over. George looked often at the younger men, who didn't have to prepare themselves minutely for the greater struggle just ahead, envying them their careless play, their proneness to over-indulgence in beer and syncopated song. While he worked with high and low prices and variations in exchange he heard them calling cheerily across the campus, gathering parties for poker or bridge or a session at the Nassau. Goodhue, even Wandel, found some time for frivolity. George strangled his instinct to join them. He had too much to do. In every diversion he took he wanted to feel there was a phase personally valuable to him.
He counted the days between his glimpses of Sylvia, and tried not to measure the hours dividing his meetings with Betty. If only he dared let himself go, dared cease battle for a little, dared justify Sylvia's attitude! Even Goodhue noticed his avoidance of Betty.
He encountered Sylvia in New York; asked her to dance with him; was refused; cut in when she was, in a sense, helpless; and glided around the room with a sullen, brilliant body that fairly palpitated with distaste.
Even during the summer he ran into her once on Long Island. Then he was always missing her. Perhaps she had learned to avoid him. He shrank each morning from his paper, from any bit of rumour connecting her with a man; and Blodgett, he noticed, was still making money for a bachelor bank account.
He came to conceive a liking for his flabby employer, although he was quite sure Blodgett wouldn't have bothered with him a moment if he hadn't been a prominent college man with such ties among the great as Blodgett hadn't been able to knot himself. What was more to the point, the stout man admired George's ambition. He was more generous with his surreptitious advice. He paid a larger salary which he admitted was less than George earned during that summer. George, therefore, went back to Princeton with fuller pockets. Again Mundy was loath to let him depart.
"You know more about this game than men who've worked at it for years."
His face of a parson grimaced.
"You'd soon be able to hire me, if you'd stick on the job instead of going back to college to get smashed up at football."
George, however, didn't suffer much damage that year. He played brilliantly through a season that without him would have been far more disastrous than it was.
When it was all over Squibs sat one night silently for a long time. At last he stirred, lighted his pipe, and spoke.
"I ought to say to you, George, that I was as satisfied with you in defeat as I was in victory."
"I outplayed Planter, anyway, didn't I?"
Bailly studied him.
"Did that mean more to you than having Princeton beaten?"
"It kept Princeton from being beaten worse than it was."
"Yes," Bailly admitted, "and, perhaps, you are right to find a personal victory somewhere in a general defeat."
"But you really think it selfish," George said.
"I wish," Bailly answered, "I could graft on your brain some of Allen's mental processes, even his dissatisfactions."
"You can't," George said, bluntly. "I'm tired of Allen's smash talk. Most people like him could be bought with the very conditions they attack."
Bailly arose and limped up and down. When he spoke his voice vibrated with an unaccustomed passion:
"I don't know. I don't think so. But I want you to realize that prostrate worship of the fat old god success is as wicked as any other idolatry. I want you to understand that Allen and his kind may be sincere and right, that a vision unblinded by the bull's-eye may see the target all awry. My fear goes back to your first days here. You are still ashamed of service."
"I've served," George said, hotly.
"Was it real service," Bailly asked gently, "or a shot at the bull's-eye?"
Almost involuntarily George clapped his fingers to his head.
"You're wrong, sir," he cried. "I've served when nothing but the thought of service brought me through."
Mrs. Bailly hurried in. She put one hand on George's shoulder. With the other she patted his hair.
"What's he scolding my boy for?"
George grinned at Bailly.
"Don't you see, sir, if I were as bad as you think she couldn't do that?"
Bailly nodded thoughtfully.
"If you've served as you say you must be merely hiding the good."
To himself at times George acknowledged his badness, in Bailly's terms at least. He sometimes sympathized with Allen's point of view, even while he heckled that angular man who often sat with him and Goodhue, talking about strikes, and violence, and drunkenness as the quickest recreation for men who had no time for play. He longed to tell Allen in justification that he had walked out of the working class himself. Later, staring at Sylvia's portrait, he would grow hard again. Men, he would repeat, wanted to smash down obstacles only because they didn't have the strength to scramble over. He had the strength. But Bailly would intrude again. What about the congenitally unsound?
"I'm not unsound," he would say to himself, studying the picture.
And he suspected that it was because he didn't want to be good that he was afraid of seeing too much of Betty Alston and her kindliness and the reminiscence of tears in her eyes. If Squibs only knew how blessedly easy it would be to turn good, to let ambition and Sylvia slip into a remote and ugly memory! More frequently now he stared at her portrait, forcing into his heart the thought of hatred and into her face the expression of it; for the more hatred there was between them, the smaller was the chance of his growing weak.
He longed for the approaching escape from his gravest temptation. When he was through college and definitely in New York he would find it simpler to be hard. For that matter, why should he grow weak? He had achieved a success far beyond the common. He would graduate president of his class, captain of the football team, although he had tried to throw both honours to Goodhue; member of the club that had drawn the best men of his year, a power in the Senior Council; the man who had done most for Princeton; a high-stand scholar; and, most important of all, one who had acquired with his education a certain amount of culture and an ease of manner in any company. Allen was still angular, as were most of those other men who had come here, like George, with nothing behind them.
In his success he saw no miracle, no luck beyond Squibs' early interest. What he had won he had applied himself to get with hardness, cold calculation, an indomitable will. He had kept his eyes open. He had used everybody, everything, to help him climb toward Sylvia out of the valley of humiliation. The qualities that had brought him all that were good qualities, worth clinging to. As he had climbed he would continue in spite of Bailly or Allen or Betty. But when he thought of Betty he had to fight the tears from his own eyes.
A little while before his graduation he went to her, knowing he must do something to make her less kind, to destroy the impression she gave him of one who, like Mrs. Bailly, always thought of him at his best.
He walked alone through a bland moonlight scented with honeysuckle from the hedges. His heart beat as it had that day four years ago when he had unintentionally let Sylvia know his presumptuous craving.
Two white figures strolled in front of the house. He went up, striving to overcome the absurd reluctance in his heart. It wasn't simple to destroy a thing as beautiful as this friendship. Betty paused and turned, drawing her mother around.
"I thought you'd quite forgotten us, George."
Nor did he want to kill the welcome in her voice.
"You're leaving Princeton very soon," Mrs. Alston said. "I'm glad you've come. Of course, it isn't to say good-bye."
He wondered if she didn't long for a parting to be broken only by occasional meetings in town. He wondered if she didn't fear for Betty. If there had been no Sylvia, if he had dared abandon the hard things and ask for Betty, this imperious woman would have put plenty of searching questions. But, he reflected, if it hadn't been for Sylvia he never would have come so far, never would have come to Betty. Every consideration held him on his course.
He feared that Mrs. Alston, in her narrow, careful manner, wouldn't give him an opportunity to speak to Betty alone. He was glad when they went in and found Mr. Alston, who liked and admired him. When he left there must come a chance. As he said good-night, indeed, Betty followed him to the hall, and he whispered, so that the servant couldn't hear:
"Betty, I've a confession. Won't you walk toward the gate with me?"
The colour entered her white face as she turned and called to her mother:
"I'll walk to the gate with George."
From the room he fancied a rustling, irritated acknowledgment.
But she came, throwing a transparent scarf over her tawny hair, and they were alone in the moonlight and the scent of flowers, walking side by side across grass, beneath the heavy branches of trees.
"See here, Betty! I've no business to call you that—never have had. Without saying anything I've lied to you ever since I've been in Princeton. I've taken advantage of your friendship."
She paused. The thick leaves let through sufficient light to show him the bewilderment in her eyes. Her voice was a little frightened.
"You can't make me believe that. You're not the sort of man that does such things. I don't know what you're talking about."
"Thanks," he said, "but you're wrong, and I can't go away without telling you just what I am."
"You're just—George Morton," she said with a troubled smile.
He tried not to listen. He hurried on with this killing that appealed to him as necessary.
"Remember the day in Freshman year, or before, wasn't it, when you recognized Sylvia Planter's bulldog? It was her dog. She had given him away—to me, because she had set him on me, and instead of biting he had licked my face. So she said to take him away because she could never bear to see him again."
Betty's bewilderment grew. She spoke gropingly.
"I guessed there had been something unusual between you and the Planters. What difference does it make? Why do you tell me now? Anything as old as that makes no difference."
"But it does," he blurted out. "I know you too well now not to tell you."
"But you and Lambert are good friends. You dance with Sylvia."
"And she," he said with a harsh laugh, "still calls me an impertinent servant."
Betty started. She drew a little away.
"What? What are you talking about?"
"Just that," he said, softly.
He forced himself to a relentless description of his father and mother, of the livery stable, of the failure, of his acceptance of the privilege to be a paid by the week guardian on a horse of the beautiful Sylvia Planter. The only point he left obscure was the sentimental basis of his quarrel with her.
"Iwasimpertinent," he ended. "She called me an impertinent servant, a stable boy, other pleasant names. She had me fired, or would have, if I hadn't been going anyway. Now you know how I've lied to you and what I am!"
He waited, arms half raised, as one awaits an inevitable blow. For a minute she continued to stare. Then she stepped nearer. Although he had suffered to win an opposite response, she did what he had forced Lambert Planter to do.
"No wonder Lambert admires you," she said, warmly. "To do so much from such a beginning! I knew at first you were different from—from us. You're not now. It's——"
She broke off, drawing away a little again. He struggled to keep his hands from her white, slender figure, from her hair, yellow in the moonlight.
"You don't understand," he said, desperately. "This thing that you say I've become is only veneer. It may have thickened, but it's still veneer."
It hurt to say that more than anything else, for all along he had been afraid it was the truth.
"Underneath the veneer," he went on, "I'm the mucker, the stable boy if you like. If I were anything else I would have told you all this years ago. Betty! Betty!"
She drew farther away. He thought her voice was frightened, not quite clear.
"Please! Don't say anything more now. I'd rather not. I—I——Listen! What difference does it make to me or anybody where you came from? You're what you are, what you always have been since I've known you. It was brave to tell me. I know that. I'm going now. Please——"
She moved swiftly forward, stretching out her hand. He took it, felt its uncertain movement in his, wondered why it was so cold, tightened his grasp on its delightful and bewitching fragility. Her voice was uncertain, too. It caressed him as he unconsciously caressed her hand.
"Good-night, George."
He couldn't help holding that slender hand tighter. She swayed away, whispering breathlessly:
"Let me go now!"
He opened his fingers, and she ran lightly, with a broken laugh, across the lawn away from him.
The moonlight was like the half light of a breathless chapel, and the scent of flowers suggested death; yet he had not killed what he had come to kill.
When he couldn't see her white figure any more George Morton, greatest of football players, big man of his class, already with greedy fingers in the fat purse of Wall Street, flung himself on the thick grass and fought to keep his shoulders from jerking, his throat from choking, his eyes from filling with tears.
George left Princeton with a sense of flight. The reception of a diploma didn't interest him, nor did the cheers he received class day or on the afternoon of the Yale baseball game when, beneath a Japanese parasol, he led the seniors in front of admiring thousands who audibly identified him for each other.
The man that had done most for Princeton! He admitted he had done a good deal for himself. Of course, Squibs was right and he was abnormally selfish; only it was too bad Betty couldn't have thought so. He had tried to make her and had failed, he told himself, because Betty couldn't understand selfishness.
He avoided during those last days every chance of seeing her alone; but even in the presence of others he was aware of an alteration in her manner, to be traced, doubtless, to the night of his difficult confession. She was kinder, but her eyes were often puzzled, as if she couldn't understand why he didn't want to see her alone.
He counted the moments, anxious for Blodgett and the enveloping atmosphere of his marble-and-mahogany office. That would break the last permanent tie. He would return to Princeton, naturally, but for only a day or two now and then, too short a time to permit its influences appreciably to swerve him.
Without meaning to, he let himself soften on the very edge of his departure when the class sang on the steps of Nassau Hall for the last time, then burned the benches about the cannon, and in lock step, hands on shoulders, shuffled slowly away like men who have accomplished the interment of their youth.
A lot of these mourning fellows he would never meet again; but he would see plenty of Goodhue and Wandel and other useful people. Why, then, did he abruptly and sharply regret his separation from all the others, even the submerged ones who had got from Princeton only an education taken like medicine and of about as much value? In the sway of this mood, induced by permanent farewells, he came upon Dalrymple.
"There's no point saying good-bye to you," George offered, kindly.
Of course not. They would meet each other in town too frequently, secreting a private enmity behind publicly worn masks of friendship. George was wandering on, but Dalrymple halted him. The man was a trifle drunk, and the sentiment of the moment had penetrated his narrow mind.
"Not been very good friends, George, you and I."
Even then George shrank from his apologies, since he appreciated their precise value.
"Why don't you forget it?" he asked, gruffly.
Dalrymple nodded, but George knew in the morning the other would regret having said as much as he had.
Immediately after that sombre dissolution of the class George said good-bye to the Baillys. Although it was quite late they sat waiting for him in the study, neat and serene as it had been on that first day a hundred years ago. The room was quite the same except that Bill Gregory's picture had lost prominence while George's stood in the place of honour—an incentive for new men, although George was confident Squibs didn't urge certain of his qualities on his youngsters.
Squibs looked older to-night, nearly as old, George thought, as the disgraceful tweeds which he still wore. Mrs. Bailly sat in the shadows. George kissed her and sank on the sofa at her side. She put her hand out and groped for his, clinging to his fingers with a sort of despair. For a long time they sat without speaking. George put his arm around her and waited for one or the other to break this silence which became unbearable. He couldn't, because as he dreamed among the shadows there slipped into his mind the appearance and the atmosphere of another room where three had sat without words on the eve of a vital parting. Tawdry details came back of stove and littered table and ungainly chairs, and of swollen hands and swollen eyes. He had suffered an unbearable silence then because he had found himself suddenly incapable of speaking his companions' language. With these two the silence was more difficult, because there was too much to say—more than ever could be said.
He started. Suppose Squibs at the very last should use his father's parting words:
"It's a bad start, but maybe you'll turn out all right after all."
His lips tightened. Would it be any truer now than it had been then? For that matter, would Squibs have cared for him or done as much for him, if he had been less ambitious, if he had compromised at all?
One thing was definite: No matter what he did these two would never demand his exile; and the old pain caught him, and he knew it was real, and not a specious cover for his relief at not having to see his parents again. It hurt—most of all his mother's acceptance of a judgment she should have fought with all her soul.
He stroked the soft hand that clung to his. From that parting he had come to the tender and eager maternal affection of this childless woman, and he knew she would always believe he was right.
But she wanted him to have Betty——
He stood up. He was going away from home. She expressed that at the door.
"This is your home, George."
Bailly nodded.
"Never forget that. Don't let your ideas smoulder in your own brain. Come home, and talk them over."
George kissed Mrs. Bailly. He put his hands on Bailly's narrow shoulders. He looked at the young eyes in a wrinkled face.
"The thing that hurts me most," he muttered, "is that I haven't paid you back."
"Perhaps not altogether," Bailly answered, gravely, "but someday you may."
The last thing George did before leaving his dismantled room, which for so long had sheltered Sylvia's riding crop and her photograph, was to write this little note to Betty:
Dear Betty:It's simpler to go without saying good-bye.G. M.
Dear Betty:
It's simpler to go without saying good-bye.
G. M.
Then he was hustled through the window of the railroad train, out of Princeton, and definitely into the market-place.
After the sentiment of the final days the crowding, unyielding buildings, and the men that shared astonishingly their qualities, offered him a useful restorative. He found he could approximate their essential hardness again.
The Street at times resembled the campus—it held so many of the men he had learned to know at Princeton. Lambert was installed in his father's marble temple. He caught George one day on the sidewalk and hustled him to a luncheon club.
"I suppose I really ought to put you up here."
"Why?" George asked.
"Because I'm always sure of a good scrap with you. I missed not playing against you in the Princeton game last fall. Now there's no more football for either of us. I like scraps."
Blodgett, he chanced to mention later, had spent the previous week-end at Oakmont. Blodgett had already bragged of that in George's presence. He forgot the excellent dishes Lambert had had placed before him.
"Have you put Blodgett up here, too?" he asked in his bluntest manner.
Lambert shook his head.
"That's different."
"Not very honestly different," George said, attempting a smile.
"You mean," Lambert laughed, "because I've never asked you to Oakmont? Under the circumstances——"
"I don't mean that," George said. "I mean Blodgett."
"I can only arrange my own likes and dislikes," Lambert answered, still amused.
Then who at Oakmont liked the fat financier?
Rogers was in the street, too, selling bonds with his old attitude toward the serious side of life, striving earnestly only to spy out the right crowd and to run with it.
"Buy my bonds! Buy my bonds!" he would cry, coming into George's office. "They're each and every one a bargain. Remember, what's a bargain to-day may be a dead loss to-morrow, so buy before it's too late."
Goodhue planned to enter a stock exchange firm in the fall, and a lot of other men from the class would come down then after a long rest between college and tackling the world on twenty dollars a month. Wandel alone of George's intimates rested irresolute. George, since he had taken two rooms and a bath in the apartment house in which Wandel lived, saw him frequently. He could easily afford that luxury, for each summer his balance had grown, and Blodgett, now that he had George for as long as he could keep him, was paying him handsomely, and flattering him by drawing on the store of special knowledge his extended and difficult application had hoarded.
To live in such a house, moreover, was necessary to his campaign, which, he admitted, had lagged alarmingly. Sylvia had continued to avoid him. She seemed to possess a special sense for the houses and the parties where he would be, and when, in spite of this, they did meet, she tried to impress him with a thorough indifference; or, if she couldn't avoid a dance, with a rigid repulsion that failed to harmonize with her warm colouring and her exquisite femininity.
Through some means he had to get on. His restless apprehension had grown. Her departure for Europe with her mother fed the rumours that from time to time had connected her name with eligible men. It was even hinted now that her mother's eyesight, which reached to social greatness across the Atlantic, was responsible for her celibacy.
"There'll be an announcement before she comes back," the gossip ran. "They'll land a museum piece of a title."
George didn't know about that, but he did realize that unless he could progress, one day a rumour would take body. He resented bitterly her absence this summer, but if things would carry on until the fall he would manage, he promised himself, to get ahead with Sylvia.
Wandel seemed to enjoy having George near, for, irresolute as he was, he spent practically the entire summer in town. George, one night when they had returned from two hours' suffering of a summer show, asked him the reason. They smoked in Wandel's library.
"I can look around better here," was all Wandel would say.
"But Driggs! Those precious talents!"
Wandel stretched himself in an easy chair.
"What would you suggest, great man?"
George laughed.
"Do you write poetry in secret—the big, wicked, and suffering city, seen from a tenth-story window overlooking a pretty park?"
Vehemently Wandel shook his head.
"You know what most of our modern American jinglers are up to—talking socialism or anarchy to get themselves talked about. If only they wouldn't apply such insincere and half-digested theories to their art! It's a little like modern popular music—criminal intervals and measures against all the rules. But crime, you see, is invariably arresting. My apologies to the fox-trot geniuses. They pretend to be nothing more than clever mutilators; but the jinglers! They are great reformers. Bah! They remind me of a naughty child who proudly displays the picture he has torn into grotesque pieces, saying: 'Come quick, mother, and see what smart little Aleck has done.' You'll have to try again, George."
George glanced up. His face was serious.
"Don't laugh at me. I mean it. Politics."
"At Princeton I wasn't bad at that," Wandel admitted, smiling reminiscently. "But politics mixes a man with an unlovely crowd—uncouth provincials, a lot of them, and some who are to all purposes foreigners. Do you know, my dear George, that ability to read and write is essential to occupying a seat in the United States Senate? I was amazed the other day to hear it was so. You see how simple it is to misjudge."
"Then there's room," George laughed, "for more honest, well-educated, well-bred Americans."
"Seems to me," Wandel drawled, "that a little broad-minded practicality in our politics would be more useful than bovine honesty. I could furnish that. How should I begin?"
"You might get a start in the State Department," George suggested, "diplomacy, a secretaryship——"
"For once you're wrong," Wandel objected. "In this country diplomacy is a destination rather than a route. The good jobs are frequently given for services rendered, or men pay enormous sums for the privilege of being taken for waiters at their own functions. To start at the bottom——Oh, no. I don't possess the cerebral vacuity, and you can only climb out of the service."
"Just the same," George laughed, "you'd make a tricky politician."
Wandel puffed thoughtfully.
"You're a far-seeing, a far-going person," he said. "You are bound to be a very rich man. You'll want a few practical politicians. Isn't it so? Never mind, but it's understood if I ever run for President or coroner you'll back me with your money bags."
George glanced about the room, as striking and costly in its French fashion as the green study had been.
"You have all the money you need," he said.
"But I'd be a rotten politician," Wandel answered, "if I spent any of my own money on my own campaigns. So we have an understanding if the occasion should arise——"
With a movement exceptionally quick for him, suggesting, indeed, an uncontrollable nervous reaction, Wandel sprang to his feet and went to the window where he leant out. George followed him, staring over the park's far-spread velvet, studded with the small but abundant yellow jewels of the lamps.
"What is it, little man? It's insufferable in town. Why don't you go play by the sea or in the hills?"
"Because," Wandel answered, softly, "I can't help the feeling that any occasion may arise. I don't mean our little politics, George. Time enough for them. I don't want to go. I am waiting."
George understood.
"You mean the murders at Sarajevo," he said. "You're over-sensitive. Run along and play. Nothing will come of that."
"Tell me," Wandel said, turning slowly, "that you mean what you say. Tell me you haven't figured on it already."
George shrugged his shoulders.
"You're discreet. All right. I have figured, because, if anything should come of it, it offers the chance of a lifetime for making money. Mundy's put me in touch with some useful people in London and Paris. I want to be ready if things should break. I hope they won't. Honestly, I very much doubt if they will. Even Germany will think twice before forcing a general war."
"But you're making ready," Wandel whispered, "on the off-chance."
George pressed a switch and got more light. It was as if a heavy shadow had filled the delightful room.
"We're growing fanciful," he said, "seeing things in the dark. By the way, you run into Dalrymple occasionally? I'm told he comes often to town."
Wandel left the window, nodding.
"How long can he keep it up?" George asked.
"I'm not a physician."
"No, no. I mean financially. I gather his family live up to what they have."
"I daresay it would pain them to settle Dolly's debts frequently," Wandel smiled.
"Then," George said, slowly, "he is fairly sure to come to you—that is, if this keeps up."
"Why," Wandel asked, "should I encourage Dolly to be charitable to rich wine agents and under-dressed females?"
George shook his head.
"If he asks you for help don't send him to the money lenders. Send him discreetly to me. If I didn't have what he'd want, I daresay I could get it."
Wandel stared, lighting another cigarette.
"I'd like to keep him from the money lenders," George said, easily.
He didn't care whether Wandel thought him a forgiving fool or a calculating scoundrel. Goodhue and Wandel had long since seen that he had been put up at a number of clubs. The two had fancied they could control Dalrymple's resentments. George, following his system, preferred a whip in his own hand. He harboured no thought of revenge, but he did want to be able to protect himself. He would use every possible means. This was one.
"We'll see," Wandel said. "It's too bad great men don't get along with little wasters."
More than once George was tempted to follow Sylvia, trusting to luck to find means of being near her. Such a trip might, indeed, lead to profit if the off chance should develop. Still that could be handled better from this side, and it was, after all, a chance. He must trust to her coming back as she had gone. His place for the present was with Blodgett and Mundy.
The chance, however, was at the back of his head when he encountered Allen late one hot night in a characteristic pose in Times Square. Allen still talked, but his audience of interested or tolerant college men had been replaced by hungry, ragged loafers and a few flushed, well-dressed males of the type that prefers any diversion to a sane return home. Allen stood in the centre of this group. His arms gestured broadly. His angular face was passionate. From the few words George caught his sympathy for these failures was beyond measure. He suggested to them the beauties of violence, the brilliancies of the social revolution. The loafers commented. The triflers laughed. Policemen edged near.
"Free liquor!" a voice shrilled.
Allen shook his fist, and continued. The proletariat would have to take matters into its own hands.
"Fine!" a hoarse and beery listener shouted, "but what'll the cops say about it?"
The edging policemen didn't bother to say anything at first. They quietly scattered the scarecrows and the laggards. They indicated the advisability of retreat for the orator. Then one burst out at Allen.
"God help the proletariat if I have to take it before McGloyne at the station house."
And George heard another sneer:
"Social revolution! They've been trying to throw Tammany out ever since I can remember."
George got Allen away. The angular man was glad to see him.
"You look overworked," George said. "Come have a modest supper with me."
Allen was hungry, but he managed to grumble discouragement over his food.
"They laugh. They'll stop listening for the price of a glass of beer."
"Maybe," George said, kindly, "they realize it's no good trying to help them."
"They've got to be helped," Allen muttered.
"Then," George suggested, "put them in institutions, but don't expect me nor any one else to approve when you urge them to grab the leadership of the world. You must have enough sense to see it would mean ruin. I know they're not all like this lot, but they're all a little wrong or they wouldn't need help."
"It's because they've never had a chance," Allen protested.
It came to George that Allen had never had a chance either, and he wondered if he, too, could be led aside by the price of a glass of beer.
"You all want what the other fellow's got," he said. "From that one motive these social movements draw the bulk of their force. A lot for nothing is a perfect poor man's creed."
"You're a heathen, Morton."
"That is, a human being," George said, good naturedly. "You're another, Allen, but you won't acknowledge it."
Because he believed that, George took the other's address. Allen was loyal, aggressive, and extraordinarily bright, as he had proved at Princeton. It might be convenient to help him. Besides, he hated to see a man he knew so well waste his time and look like a fool.
By late July the off chance had pretty thoroughly defined itself except to the blind. Blodgett, however, was still skeptical. He thought George's plans were sound, provided a war should come. But there wouldn't be any war. His correspondents were optimistic.
"Have I your permission to use Mundy in his off time?" George asked.
"As far as I'm concerned," Blodgett said, "Mundy can play parchesi in his off time."
George telephoned Lambert Planter and sent a telegram to Goodhue. He took them to luncheon and had Mundy there, too. He outlined his plans for the formation of the firm of Morton, Planter, and Goodhue.
"He's called the turn of the cards," Mundy offered.
Such cards as he possessed George placed on the table. He furnished the idea, and the preliminary organization, and what money he had. He took, therefore, the major share of the profits. The others would give what time to the business they could, but it was their money he wanted, and the credit their names would give the firm. Mundy and he had made lists of buyers and sellers. No man in the Street was better equipped than Mundy to pick such a force. If Lambert and Goodhue agreed, these men could be collected within a week. Some would go to Europe. Others would scatter over the United States. It would cost a lot, but it meant an immeasurable amount in return, for the war was inevitable.
Goodhue and Lambert were as skeptical as Blodgett, but they agreed to give him what he needed to get his organization started. By that time, he promised them, they would see how right he was, and then he could use more of their money.
"It's the nearest I've ever come to gambling," he thought as he left them. "Gambling on a war!"
Because of his confidence, before a frontier had been crossed he had bought or contracted for large quantities of shoes and cloths and waterproofing. He had taken options on stock in small and wavering automobile concerns, and outlying machine shops and foundries, some of them already closed down, some struggling along without hope.
"If the war lasts a month," he told his partners, "those stocks will come from the bottom of nothing to the sky."
Goodhue became thoroughly interested at last. He cancelled his vacation and installed himself in the offices George had rented in Blodgett's building. With the men Mundy had picked, and under Mundy's tutelage, he took charge of the routine. George went to Blodgett the first of August.
"I want to quit," he said. "I've got a big thing. I want to give it all my time."
Blodgett mopped his face. His grin was a little sheepish.
"I want to invest some money in your firm," he jerked out.
"I can use it," George said.
"You've got Goodhue there," Blodgett went on in a complaining way, "and Mundy's working nights for you. Don't desert an old man without notice. I'll give you plenty of time upstairs. Other things may come off here. I can use you."
"If you want to pay me when you know my chief interest is somewhere else," George said, "it's up to you."
"When I think I'm getting stung I'll let you know," Blodgett roared.
George sent for Allen, and urged him to go to London to open an office with an expert Lambert had got from his father's marble temple. Allen would be a check on the more experienced men whose scruples might not stand the temptations of this vast opportunity. Allen said he couldn't do it; couldn't abandon the work he had already commenced.
"There'll be precious little talk of socialism," George said, "until this thing is over. It's a great chance for a man to study close up the biggest change the world has ever undergone. Those fellows will want everything, and I'll give them everything I can lay my hands on. I'm ahead of a lot of jobbers here. I'll pay you well to see I don't get robbed on that side. Come on. Take a shot at hard facts for a change."
Allen gasped at the salary George mentioned. He hesitated. He went. George was glad to have helped him. He experienced also an ugly sense of triumph. He felt that he wanted to tell Squibs Bailly right away.
Sylvia and her mother, he heard later, had come home out of the turmoil, unacquainted with the discomforts of people who had travelled without the Planter prestige. Whether the war was to blame or not, she had returned without a single rumour touching fact. He didn't see her right away, because she clung to Oakmont. More and more, as his success multiplied, keeping pace with the agony in Europe, he longed to see her. All at once a return to Oakmont was, in a sense, forced upon him, but he went without any thought of encountering Sylvia, hoping, indeed, to avoid her.
It was like his mother to express her letter with telegraphic bluntness without, however, going to the expense of actually wiring. Where he had expected her customary stiff gratitude for money sent he found a scrawled announcement of his father's death, and her plans for the funeral the following afternoon.
"Of course you won't come," she ended.
Yet it seemed to him that he should go, to arrange her future. This was the moment to snap the last enslaving tie between the Mortons and Oakmont. There was, of course, the chance of running into Sylvia, or some visitor who might connect him with the little house. Suppose Dalrymple, for example, should be staying with the Planters as he often did? George shrugged his shoulders. Things were coming rather rapidly to him. Besides, it was extremely unlikely that any one from the great house would see the Morton ceremony. The instincts of those people would be to avoid such sights.
About his return there was a compelling thrill. He drove from the station in one of the cheap automobiles that had made his father practically a pensioner of the Planters. With an incredulous appreciation that he had once accepted its horizon as the boundary of his life, he examined the familiar landscape and the scar made upon it by the village. Curtly he refused to satisfy the driver's curiosity. He had some business at the little house on the Planter estate.
There, through the nearly stripped trees, it showed, almost audibly confessing its debt to the Planter carpenters, painters, and gardeners. In a clouded light late fall flowers waved from masses of dead leaves. Their gay colours gave them an appearance melancholy and apprehensive.
Here he was back at last, and he wasn't going in at the great gate.
He walked around the shuttered house and crossed the porch where his father had liked to sit on warm evenings. He rapped at the door. Feet shuffled inside. The door swayed open, and his mother stood on the threshold. Most of the changes had come to him, but in her red eyes sparkled a momentary and mournful importance. At first she didn't recognize her son.
"What is it?"
George stooped and kissed her cheek.
"I'm sorry, Mother."
Instead of holding out her arms she drew away, staring with fascination, a species of terror, at his straight figure, at his clothing, at his face that wouldn't coarsen now. When she spoke her voice suggested a placating of this stranger who was her son.
"I didn't think you'd come. I can't believe you're George—my Georgie."
Over her shoulders in the shadowed house he saw the inquisitive faces of women. It was clear that for them such an arrival was more divertive than the sharing of a sorrow that scarcely touched their hearts.
George went in. He remembered most of the faces that disclosed excitement while fawning upon his prosperity. He received an unpleasant impression that these poor and ignorant people concealed a dangerous envy, that they would be glad to grasp in one moment, even of violence, all that it had taken him years of difficult struggle to acquire. Whether that was so or not they ought not to stand before him as if his success were a crown. He tried to keep contempt from his voice.
"Please sit down. I want to talk to my mother. Where——"
With slow steps she crossed the kitchen and opened the door of the parlour, beckoning. He followed, knowing what he would find in that uncomfortable, gala room of the poor.
He closed the door. In the half light he saw standing on trestles an oblong box altogether too large for the walls that seemed to crowd it. He had no feeling that anything of his father was there. He realized with a sense of helpless regret that all that remained to him of that unhappy man were the ghosts of such emotions as avarice, fear, and the instinct to sacrifice one's own flesh and blood for a competence.
"Why don't you look at him, George?"
"I don't think he'd care to have me looking at him now."
She wiped her eyes.
"You are too bitter against your father. After all, he was a good man."
"Why should death," he asked her, musingly, "make people seem better than they were in life? It isn't so."
"That's wicked. If your father could rise——"
His attention was caught by an air of pointing the oblong box had, as if to something infinitely farther than ambition and success, yet so close it angered him he couldn't see or touch it. His father had gone there, beyond the farthest horizon of all. Old Planter couldn't make trouble for him now. He was quite safe.
Over in Europe, he reflected, they didn't have enough coffins.
The oblong box for the first time made him think of that war, that was making him rich, in terms of life instead of dollars and cents. He felt dissatisfied.
"There should be more light here," he said, defensively.
But his mother shook her head.
He arranged a chair for her and sat near by while they discussed the details of her departure. She let him see that she shrank from leaving the house, against which, nevertheless, she had bitterly complained ever since Old Planter had got it. Evidently she wanted to linger in her familiar rut, awaiting with the attitude of a martyr whatever fate might offer. That was the reason people had to be helped, because they preferred vicious inertia to the efforts and risks of change. Then why did they want the prizes of those who had had the courage to go forth and fight? Why couldn't Squibs see that?
Patiently George told her she needn't worry about money again. She had a sister who years ago had married and moved West to a farm that was not particularly flourishing. Undoubtedly her sister would be glad to have her and her generous allowance. So his will overcame his mother's reluctance to help herself. She glanced up.
"Who is that?"
He listened. The women in the kitchen were standing again. Light feet crossed the floor.
"Maybe somebody from the big house," his mother whispered. "They sent Simpson last night."
For a moment the entire building was as silent as the oblong box. Then the door opened.
Sylvia Planter slipped in and closed the door.
George caught his breath, studying her as she hesitated, accustoming herself to the insufficient light. She wore a broad-brimmed hat that gave her the charm and the grace of a portrait by Gainsborough. When she recognized him, indeed, she seemed as permanently caught as a portrait.
"Miss Sylvia!" his mother worshipped.
"They told me I would find you here," Sylvia said, uncertainly. "I didn't know——"
She broke off, biting her lip. George strolled around the oblong box to the window, turning there with a slow bow. Even across that desolate, dead shell, the obstinate distaste and the challenge were lively in her glance.
"It was very kind of you to come," he said.
But he was sorry she had come. To see him in such surroundings was a stimulation of the ugly memories he had struggled to destroy. He read her instinct to hurt him now as she had hurt the impertinent man, Morton, who had lived in this house.
"When one of our people is in trouble——" she began, deliberately. "I thought I might be of some help to your mother."
Even over the feeling of security George had just tried to give her the old menace reached the uneasy woman.
"You—you remember him, Miss Sylvia?"
"Very well," Sylvia answered. "He used to be my groom."
"The title comes from you," George said, dryly.
His mother's glance fluttered from one to the other. What did she expect—Old Planter stalking in to carry out his threats?
"After all these years I scarcely knew him myself."
Sylvia's colour heightened. He appraised her rising temper.
"Bad servants," he said, "linger in good employers' memories."
"I know, Miss Sylvia," his mother burst out, "that he wasn't to come back here, but——"
She unclasped her nervous hands. One indicated the silent cause of his disobedience. George moved toward the door. Sylvia stepped quickly aside. He felt, like a physical wave, her desire to hurt.
"At such a time," she said, "it's natural he should come back to his home. I think my father would be glad to have him with his mother."
George shrugged his shoulders, slipped out, navigated the shoals of whispering women, and reached the clean air. He buttoned his overcoat and shuffled through the dead leaves beneath the trees until he found himself at the spot where Lambert and he had fought. He recalled his hot boasts of that day. Fulfilment had seemed simple enough then. The scene just submitted reminded him how short a distance he had actually travelled.
He knew she would pass that way on her return to the big house, so he waited, and when he heard her feet disturbing the dead leaves he didn't turn. She came closer than he had expected, and he heard her contralto voice, quick and defiant:
"I hadn't expected to see you. I didn't quite realize what I was saying. I should have had more respect for any one's grief."
Having said that, she was going on, but he turned and stopped her. As he looked at her he reflected that everything had altered since that day—she most of all. Then the woman had been a little visible in the child. Now, he fancied, the child survived in the woman only through the persistence of this old quarrel. He stared at her lips, recalling his boast that no man should touch them unless it were George Morton. He was no nearer them than he had been that day. Unless he got nearer some man would. It was incredible that she hadn't married. She would marry.
"In the sense you mean, I have no grief," he said.
"Then I needn't have bothered. I once said you were a—a——"
"Something melodramatic. A beast, I think it was," he answered. "If you don't mind I'll walk on with you for a little way."
"No," she said.
"If you please."
"You've no perception," she cried, angrily.
"Don't you think it time," he suggested, "that you ceased treating me like a groom? It isn't very convincing to me. I doubt if it is to you. I fancy it's really only your pride. I don't see why you should have so much where I am concerned."
Her hand made a quick gesture of repulsion.
"You've not changed. You may walk on with me while I tell you this: If you were like the men I know and can be friends with you'd leave me alone. Will you stop this persecution? It comes down to that. Will you stop forcing me to dance with you, to listen to you?"