Part 103

“You don't hate me, do you?”

“Why should I? Just remember this: while you were carrying this burden, I was happier than I'd ever been. I'll tell you about it some time.”

She got up, and he perceived that she expected him again to take her in his arms. He felt ridiculous and resentful, and rather as though he was expected to kiss the hand that had beaten him, but when she came close to him he put an arm around her shoulders.

“Poor Bev!” he said. “We've made pretty much a mess of it, haven't we?”

He patted her and let her go, and her eyes followed him as he left the room. The elder brotherliness of that embrace had told her the truth as he could never have hurt her in words. She went back to the chair where he had sat, and leaned her cheek against it.

After a time she went slowly upstairs and into her room. When her maid came in she found her before the mirror of her dressing-table, staring at her reflection with hard, appraising eyes.

Leslie's partner, wandering into the hotel at six o'clock, found from the disordered condition of the room that Leslie had been back, had apparently bathed, shaved and made a careful toilet, and gone out again. Joe found himself unexpectedly at a loose end. Filled with suppressed indignation he commenced to dress, getting out a shirt, hunting his evening studs, and lining up what he meant to say to Leslie over his defection.

Then, at a quarter to seven, Leslie came in, top-hatted and morning-coated, with a yellowing gardenia in his buttonhole and his shoes covered with dust.

“Hello, Les,” Joe said, glancing up from a laborious struggle with a stud. “Been to a wedding?”

“Why?”

“You look like it.”

“I made a call, and since then I've been walking.”

“Some walk, I'd say,” Joe observed, looking at him shrewdly. “What's wrong, Les? Fair one turn you down?”

“Go to hell,” Leslie said irritably.

He flung off his coat and jerked at his tie. Then, with it hanging loose, he turned to Joe.

“I'm going to tell you something. I know it's safe with you, and I need some advice. I called on a woman this afternoon. You know who she is. Beverly Carlysle.”

Joe whistled softly.

“That's not the point,” Leslie declaimed, in a truculent voice. “I'm not defending myself. She's a friend; I've got a right to call there if I want to.”

“Sure you have,” soothed Joe.

“Well, you know the situation at home, and who Livingstone actually is. The point is that, while that poor kid at home is sitting around killing herself with grief, Clark's gone back to her. To Beverly Carlysle.”

“How do you know?”

“Know? I saw him this afternoon, at her house.”

He sat still, moodily reviewing the situation. His thoughts were a chaotic and unpleasant mixture of jealousy, fear of Nina, anxiety over Elizabeth, and the sense of a lost romantic adventure. After a while he got up.

“She's a nice kid,” he said. “I'm fond of her. And I don't know what to do.”

Suddenly Joe grinned.

“I see,” he said. “And you can't tell her, or the family, where you saw him!”

“Not without raising the deuce of a row.”

He began, automatically, to dress for dinner. Joe moved around the room, rang for a waiter, ordered orange juice and ice, and produced a bottle of gin from his bag. Leslie did not hear him, nor the later preparation of the cocktails. He was reflecting bitterly on the fact that a man who married built himself a wall against romance, a wall, compounded of his own new sense of responsibility, of family ties, and fear.