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Welcome
John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC

here's a little Billy Shakespeare for ya's



When a father gives to his son, both laugh; when a son gives to his father, both cry.

Good night, good night! Parting is such sweet sorrow, that I shall say good night till it be morrow.

Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once.

The course of true love never did run smooth.

Better three hours too soon than a minute too late.

Love to faults is always blind, always is to joy inclined. Lawless, winged, and unconfined, and breaks all chains from every mind.

But O, how bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through another man's eyes.

No legacy is so rich as honesty.


Eric Dolphy, free jazz

Although Dolphy's work is sometimes classified as free jazz, his compositions and solos were often rooted in conventional (if highly abstracted) tonal bebop harmony and melodic lines that suggest the influences of modern classical composers such as Béla Bartók and Igor Stravinsky.


Formula of Spring, 1920, Pavel Filonov (and other works) because this was an artist who loved art for the sake of art.



Pavel Nikolayevich Filonov ( January 8, 1883 – December 3, 1941) was a Russian avant-garde painter, art theorist, and poet.  In 1908, he entered St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, from which, he was expelled in 1910.
In the autumn of 1916, he enlisted for service in World War I, and served on the Romanian front. Filonov participated actively in the Russian Revolution of 1917 and served as the Chairman of the Revolutionary War Committee of Dunay region.

In 1929, a large retrospective exhibition of Filonov art was planned at the Russian Museum; however, the Soviet government forbade the exhibition from going forward. From 1932 onward, Filonov literally starved but still refused to sell his works to private collectors. He wanted to give all his works to the Russian Museum as a gift so as to start a Museum of Analytical Realism. He died of starvation on December 3, 1941 during the Siege of Leningrad.


Filonov Selfportrait 1921.JPG



 

A Man and a Woman
1912


 

Peasant Family
1915


 

Flight to Egypt
1918


 

Ships
1919


 

Worker in a Cap


 

Collective-Farm Worker
1931


 
People


 

Easter
1912



 
MOPR. Prison
1927


 

Man and Woman


 

West and East
1912



 

They Who Have Nothing to Lose


 

Pancake Tuesday


 

Rebirth of a Man


 

Formula of Spring
1920


 

Head
 
 

Dylan Thomas: Should lanterns shine, the holy face,



Should lanterns shine, the holy face,
Caught in an octagon of unaccustomed light,
Would wither up, and any boy of love
Look twice before he fell from grace.
The features in their private dark
Are formed of flesh, but let the false day come
And from her lips the added pigments fall,
The mummy cloths expose an ancient breast.
I have been taught to reason by the heart,
But heart, like head, leads helplessly;
I have been told to reason by the pulse,
And, when it quickens, alter the actions’ pace
Till field and roof lie level and the same
So fast I move defying time, the quiet gentleman
Whose beard wags in Egyptian wind.
I have heard many years of telling,
And many years should see some change.
The ball I threw while playing in the park
Has not yet reached the ground.

Dylan Thomas.


Candle Mirror, 1934, M.C. Escher. Mathematics as art.








Wynton Kelly


Wynton Charles Kelly (December 2, 1931 – April 12, 1971) was a jazz pianist and composer. He is known for his lively, blues-based playing and as one of the finest accompanists in jazz. He began playing professionally at the age of 12 and was pianist on a No. 1 R&B hit at the age of 16. His recording debut as leader occurred three years later, around the time he started to become better known as accompanist to singer Dinah Washington, and as a member of trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie's band. This progress was interrupted by two years in the United States Army, after which Kelly returned to Washington and Gillespie, and played with other leaders. Over the next few years, these included instrumentalists Julian "Cannonball" Adderley, John Coltrane, Roland Kirk, Wes Montgomery, and Sonny Rollins, and vocalists Betty Carter, Billie Holiday, and Abbey Lincoln.
Kelly attracted the most attention as part of Miles Davis' band from 1959, including an appearance on the trumpeter's Kind of Blue, often mentioned as the best-selling jazz album ever. After leaving Davis in 1963, Kelly played with his own trio, which recorded for several labels and toured the United States and internationally. His career did not develop much further, and he had difficulty finding enough work late in his career. Kelly, who was prone to epilepsy, died in a hotel room in Canada following a seizure, aged 39.


Li Young-Lee


Image result for Li Young-Lee 

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward  
signs painted Peaches.
From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to impossible
blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.



The Rich Boy. A short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald


THE RICH BOY


BEGIN WITH an individual, and before you know it you find that
you have created a type ; begin with a type, and you find that you
have created nothing. That is because we are all queer fish, queerer
behind our faces and voices than we want any one to know or than
we know ourselves. When I hear a man proclaiming himself an
"average, honest, open fellow," I feel pretty sure that he has some
definite and perhaps terrible abnormality which he has agreed to con-
ceal and his protestation of being average and honest and open is
his way of reminding himself of his misprision.

There are no types, no plurals. There is a rich boy, and this is his
and not his brothers' story. All my life I have lived among his
brothers but this one has been my friend. Besides, if I wrote about
his brothers I should have to begin by attacking all the lies that the
poor have told about the rich and the rich have told about them-
selves such a wild structure they have erected that when we pick
up a book about the rich, some instinct prepares us for unreality.
Even the intelligent and impassioned reporters of life have made the
country of the rich as unreal as fairy-land.

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you
and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them,
makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trust-
ful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to
understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better
than we are because we had to discover the compensations and
refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our
world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we
are. They are different. The only way I can describe young Anson
Hunter is to approach him as if he were a foreigner and cling stub-
bornly to my point of view. If I accept his for a moment I am lost
I have nothing to show but a preposterous movie.

II

Anson was the eldest of six children who would some day divide
a fortune of fifteen million dollars, and he reached the age of reason
is it seven? at the beginning of the century when daring young
women were already gliding along Fifth Avenue in electric "mobiles."
In those days he and his brother had an English governess who spoke
the language very clearly and crisply and well, so that the two boys
grew to speak as she did their words and sentences were all crisp
and clear and not run together as ours are. They didn't talk exactl}
like English children but acquired an accent that is peculiar tc
fashionable people in the city of New York.

In the summer the six children were moved from the house on
7ist Street to a big estate in northern Connecticut. It was not 2
fashionable locality Anson's father wanted to delay as long as pos-
sible his children's knowledge of that side of life. He was a man
somewhat superior to his class, which composed New York society,
and to his period, which was the snobbish and formalized vulgarity
of the Gilded Age, and he wanted his sons to learn habits of con-
centration and have sound constitutions and grow up into right-liv-
ing and successful men. He and his wife kept an eye on them as well
as they were able until the two older boys went away to school, but
in huge establishments this is difficult it was much simpler in the
series of small and medium-sized houses in which my own youth was
spent I was never far out of the reach of my mother's voice, of the
sense of her presence, her approval or disapproval.

Anson's first sense of his superiority came to him when he realized
the half-grudging American deference that was paid to him in the
Connecticut village. The parents of the boys he played with always
inquired after his father and mother, and were vaguely excited when
their own children were asked to the Hunters' house. He accepted
this as the natural state of things, and a sort of impatience with all
groups of which he was not the centre in money, in position, in
authority remained with him for the rest of his life. He disdained
to struggle with other boys for precedence he expected it to be
given him freely, and when it wasn't he withdrew into his family.
His family was sufficient, for in the East money is still a somewhat
feudal thing, a clan-forming thing. In the snobbish West, money sepa
rates families to form "sets."

At eighteen, when he went to New Haven, Anson was tall and
thick-set, with a clear complexion and a healthy color from the
ordered life he had led in school. His hair was yellow and grew in a
funny way on his head, his nose was beaked these two things kept
him from being handsome but he had a confident charm and a cer-
tain brusque style, and the upper-class men who passed him on the
street knew without being told that he was a rich boy and had gone
to one of the best schools. Nevertheless, his very superiority kept
him from being a success in college the independence was mistaken
for egotism, and the refusal to accept Yale standards with the proper
ated, he began to shift the centre of his life to New York.

He was at home in New York there was his own house with "the
kind of servants you can't get any more" and his own family, of
which, because of his good humor and a certain ability to make
things go, he was rapidly becoming the centre, and the debutante
parties, and the correct manly world of the men's clubs, and the occa-
sional wild spree with the gallant girls whom New Haven only knew
from the fifth row. His aspirations were conventional enough they
included even the irreproachable shadow he would some day marry,
but they differed from the aspirations of the majority of young men
in that there was no mist over them, none of that quality which is
variously known as "idealism" or "illusion." Anson accepted with-
out reservation the world of high finance and high extravagance, of
divorce and dissipation, of snobbery and of privilege. Most of our
lives end as a compromise it was as a compromise that his life
began.

He and I first met in the late summer of 1917 when he was just out
of Yale, and, like the rest of us, was swept up into the systematized
hysteria of the war. In the blue-green uniform of the naval aviation
he came down to Pensacola, where the hotel orchestras played "I'm
sorry, dear," and we young officers danced with the girls. Every one
liked him, and though he ran with the drinkers and wasn't an espe-
cially good pilot, even the instructors treated him with a certain
respect. He was always having long talks with them in his confident,
logical voice talks which ended by his getting himself, or, more
frequently, another officer, out of some impending trouble. He was
convivial, bawdy, robustly avid for pleasure, and we were all sur-
prised when he fell in love with a conservative and rather proper
girl.

Her name was Paula Legendre, a dark, serious beauty from some-
where in California. Her family kept a winter residence just outside
of town, and in spite of her primness she was enormously popular ;
there is a large class of men whose egotism can't endure humor in a
woman. But Anson wasn't that sort, and I couldn't understand the
attraction of her "sincerity" that was the thing to say about her
for his keen and somewhat sardonic mind.

Nevertheless, they fell in love and on her terms. He no longer
joined the twilight gathering at the De Soto bar, and whenever they
were seen together they were engaged in a long, serious dialogue,
which must have gone on several weeks. Long afterward he told me
that it was not about anything in particular but was composed on
both sides of immature and even meaningless statements the emo-
tional content that gradually came to fill it grew up not out of the
words but out of its enormous seriousness. It was a sort of hypnosis.
Often it was interrupted, giving way to that emasculated humor we
call fun ; when they were alone it was resumed again, solemn, low-
keyed, and pitched so as to give each other a sense of unity in feeling
and thought. They came to resent any interruptions of it, to be un-
responsive to facetiousness about life, even to the mild cynicism of
their contemporaries. They were only happy when the dialogue was
going on, and its seriousness bathed them like the amber glow of an
open fire. Toward the end there came an interruption they did not
resent it began to be interrupted by passion.

Oddly enough, Anson was as engrossed in the dialogue as she was
and as profoundly affected by it, yet at the same time aware that on
his side much was insincere, and on hers much was merely simple.
At first, too, he despised her emotional simplicity as well, but with
his love her nature deepened and blossomed, and he could despise it
no longer. He felt that if he could enter into Paula's warm safe life
he would be happy. The long preparation of the dialogue removed
any constraint he taught her some of what he had learned from
more adventurous women, and she responded with a rapt holy inten-
sity. One evening after a dance they agreed to marry, and he wrote
a long letter about her to his mother. The next day Paula told him
that she was rich, that she had a personal fortune of nearly a million
dollars.

Ill

It was exactly as if they could say "Neither of us has anything : we
shall be poor together" just as delightful that they should be rich
instead. It gave them the same communion of adventure. Yet when
Anson got leave in April, and Paula and her mother accompanied
him North, she was impressed with the standing of his family in
New York and with the scale on which they lived. Alone with Anson
for the first time in the rooms where he had played as a boy, she was
filled with a comfortable emotion, as though she were pre-eminently
safe and taken care of. The pictures of Anson in a skull cap at his
first school, of Anson on horseback with the sweetheart of a mysteri-
ous forgotten summer, of Anson in a gay group of ushers and brides-
maid at a wedding, made her jealous of his life apart from her in the
pst ? and so completely did his authoritative person seem to sum up
and typify these possessions of his that she was inspired with the
idea of being married immediately and returning to Pensacola as
his wife. But an immediate marriage wasn't discussed even the engage-
ment was to be secret until after the war. When she realized that
only two days of his leave remained, her dissatisfaction crystallized
in the intention of making him as unwilling to wait as she was. They
were driving to the country for dinner and she determined to force
the issue that night.

Now a cousin of Paula's was staying with them at the Ritz, a
severe, bitter girl who loved Paula but was somewhat jealous of her
impressive engagement, and as Paula was late in dressing, the cousin,
who wasn't going to the party, received Anson in the parlor of the
suite.

Anson had met friends at five o'clock and drunk freely and in-
discreetly with them for an hour. He left the Yale Club at a proper
time, and his mother's chauffeur drove him to the Ritz, but his usual
capacity was not in evidence, and the impact of the steam-heated
sitting-room made him suddenly dizzy. He knew it, and he was both
amused and sorry.

Paula's cousin was twenty-five, but she was exceptionally nai've,
and at first failed to realize what was up. She had never met Anson
before, and she was surprised when he mumbled strange information
and nearly fell off his chair, but until Paula appeared it didn't occur
to her that what she had taken for the odor of a dry-cleaned uni-*
form was really whiskey. But Paula understood as soon as she ap-
peared ; her only thought was to get Anson away before her mother
saw him, and at the look in her eyes the cousin understood too.

When Paula and Anson descended to the limousine they found two
men inside, both asleep ; they were the men with whom he had been
drinking at the Yale Club, and they were also going to the party. He
had entirely forgotten their presence in the car. On the way to Hemp-
stead they awoke and sang. Some of the songs were rough, and
though Paula tried to reconcile herself to the fact that Anson had
few verbal inhibitions, her lips tightened with shame and distaste.

Back at the hotel the cousin, confused and agitated, considered
the incident, and then walked into Mrs. Legendre's bedroom, saying :
"Isn't he funny?"

"Who is funny?"

"Why Mr. Hunter. He seemed so funny."

Mrs. Legendre looked at her sharply.

"How is he funny?"

"Why, he said he was French. I didn't know he was French."

"That's absurd. You must have misunderstood." She smiled: "It
was a joke."

The cousin shook her head stubbornly.

"No. He said he was brought up in France. He said he couldn't
speak any English, and that's why he couldn't talk to me. And he
couldn't "

Mrs. Legendre looked away with impatience just as the cousin
added thoughtfully, "Perhaps it was because he was so drunk/' and
walked out of the room.

This curious report was true. Anson, finding his voice thick and
uncontrollable, had taken the unusual refuge of announcing that he
spoke no English. Years afterwards he used to tell that part of the
story, and he invariably communicated the uproarious laughter which
the memory aroused in him.

Five times in the next hour Mrs. Legendre tried to get Hempstead
on the phone. When she succeeded, there was a ten-minute delay
before she heard Paula's voice on the wire.

"Cousin Jo told me Anson was intoxicated."

"Oh, no. . . ."

"Oh, yes. Cousin Jo says he was intoxicated. He told her he was
French, and fell off his chair and behaved as if he was very intoxi-
cated. I don't want you to come home with him."

"Mother, he's all right ! Please don't worry about "

"But I do worry. I think it's dreadful. I want you to promise me
not to come home with him."

"I'll take care of it, mother. . . ."

"I don't want you to come home with him."

"All right, mother. Good-by."

"Be sure now, Paula. Ask some one to bring you."

Deliberately Paula took the receiver from her ear and hung it up.
Her face was flushed with helpless annoyance. Anson was stretched
asleep out in a bedroom up-stairs, while the dinner-party below was
proceeding lamely toward conclusion.

The hour's drive had sobered him somewhat his arrival was
merely hilarious and Paula hoped that the evening was not spoiled,
after all, but two imprudent cocktails before dinner completed the
disaster. He talked boisterously and somewhat offensively to the
party at large for fifteen minutes, and then slid silently under the
table ; like a man in an old print but, unlike an old print, it was
rather horrible without being at all quaint. None of the young girls
present remarked upon the incident it seemed to merit only silence.
His uncle and two other men carried him up-stairs, and it was just
after this that Paula was called to the phone.

An hour later Anson awoke in a fog of nervous agony, through
which he perceived after a moment the figure of his uncle Robert
standing by the door.

". . . I said are you better?"

"What?"

"Do you feel better, old man?"

"Terrible," said Anson.

"I'm going to try you on another bromo-seltzer. If you can hold
it down, it'll do you good to sleep."

With an effort Anson slid his legs from the bed and stood up.

"I'm all right," he said dully.

"Take it easy."

"I thin' if you gave me a glassbrandy I could go down-stairs."

"Oh, no "

"Yes, that's the only thin'. I'm all right now. ... I suppose I'm
in Dutch dow' there."

"They know you're a little under the weather," said his uncle
deprecatingly. "But don't worry about it. Schuyler didn't even get
here. He passed away in the locker-room over at the Links."

Indifferent to any opinion, except Paula's, Anson was nevertheless
determined to save the d6bris of the evening, but when after a cold
bath he made his appearance most of the party had already left.
Paula got up immediately to go home.

In the limousine the old serious dialogue began. She had known
that he drank, she admitted, but she had never expected anything
like this it seemed to her that perhaps they were not suited to each
other, after all. Their ideas about life were too different, and so forth.
When she finished speaking, Anson spoke in turn, very soberly. Then
Paula said she'd have to think it over ; she wouldn't decide to-night ;
she was not angry but she was terribly sorry. Nor would she let him
come into the hotel with her, but just before she got out of the car
she leaned and kissed him unhappily on the cheek.

The next afternoon Anson had a long talk with Mrs. Legendre
while Paula sat listening in silence. It was agreed that Paula was
to brood over the incident for a proper period and then, if mother
and daughter thought it best, they would follow Anson to Pensacola.
On his part he apologized with sincerity and dignity that was all ;
with every card in her hand Mrs. Legendre was unable to establish
any advantage over him. He made no promises, showed no humility,
only delivered a few serious comments on life which brought him off
with rather a moral superiority at the end. When they came South
three weeks later, neither Anson in his satisfaction nor Paula in her
relief at the reunion realized that the psychological moment had
passed forever.

IV

He dominated and attracted her, and at the same time filled her
with anxiety. Confused by his mixture of solidity and self-indulgence,
of sentiment and cynicism incongruities which her gentle mind was
unable to resolve Paula grew to think of him as two alternating
personalities. When she saw him alone, or at a formal party, or with
his casual inferiors, she felt a tremendous pride in his strong, attrac-
tive presence, the paternal, understanding stature of his mind. In
other company she became uneasy when what had been a fine im-
perviousness to mere gentility showed its other face. The other face
was gross, humorous, reckless of everything but pleasure. It startled
her mind temporarily away from him, even led her into a short covert
experiment with an old beau, but it was no use after four months of
Anson's enveloping vitality there was an anaemic pallor in all other
men.

In July he was ordered abroad, and their tenderness and desire
reached a crescendo. Paula considered a last-minute marriage de-
cided against it only because there were always cocktails on his
breath now, but the parting itself made her physically ill with grief.
After his departure she wrote him long letters of regret for the days
of love they had missed by waiting. In August Anson's plane slipped
down into the North Sea. He was pulled onto a destroyer after a
night in the water and sent to hospital with pneumonia ; the armistice
was signed before he was finally sent home.

Then, with every opportunity given back to them, with no material
obstacle to overcome, the secret weavings of their temperaments
came between them, drying up their kisses and their tears, making
their voices less loud to one another, muffling the intimate chatter of
their hearts until the old communication was only possible by letters,
from far away. One afternoon a society reporter waited for two
hours in the Hunters' house for a confirmation of their engagement.
Anson denied it ; nevertheless an early issue carried the report as a
leading paragraph they were "constantly seen together at South-
hampton, Hot Springs, and Tuxedo Park." But the serious dialogue
had turned a corner into a long-sustained quarrel, and the affair was
almost played out. Anson got drunk flagrantly and missed an engage-
ment with her, whereupon Paula made certain behavioristic demands.
His despair was helpless before his pride and his knowledge of him-
self : the engagement was definitely broken.

"Dearest," said their letters now, "Dearest, Dearest, when I wake
up in the middle of the night and realize that after all it was not to
be, I feel that I want to die. I can't go on living any more. Perhaps
when we meet this summer we may talk things over and decide dif-
ferently we were so excited and sad that day, and I don't feel that
I can live all my life without you. You speak of other people. Don't
you know there are no other people for me, but only you. . . ."

But as Paula drifted here and there around the East she would
sometimes mention her gaieties to make him wonder. Anson was too
acute to wonder. When he saw a man's name in her letters he felt
more sure of her and a little disdainful he was always superior to
such things. But he still hoped that they would some day marry.

Meanwhile he plunged vigorously into all the movement and glitter
of post-bellum New York, entering a brokerage house, joining half
a dozen clubs, dancing late, and moving in three worlds his own
world, the world of young Yale graduates, and that section of the
half-world which rests one end on Broadway. But there was always
a thorough and infractible eight hours devoted to his work in Wall
Street, where the combination of his influential family connection,
his sharp intelligence, and his abundance of sheer physical energy
brought him almost immediately forward. He had one of those in-
valuable minds with partitions in it ; sometimes he appeared at his
office refreshed by less than an hour's sleep, but such occurrences
were rare. So early as 1920 his income in salary and commissions ex-
ceeded twelve thousand dollars.

As the Yale tradition slipped into the past he became more and
more of a popular figure among his classmates in New York, more
popular than he had ever been in college. He lived in a great house,
and had the means of introducing young men into other great houses.
Moreover, his life already seemed secure, while theirs, for the most
part, had arrived again at precarious beginnings. They commenced
to turn to him for amusement and escape, and Anson responded
readily, taking pleasure in helping people and arranging their affairs.

There were no men in Paula 's letters now, but a note of tenderness
ran through them that had not been there before. From several
sources he heard that she had "a heavy beau," Lowell Thayer, a
Bostonian of wealth and position, and though he was sure she still
loved him, it made him uneasy to think that he might lose her, after
all. Save for one unsatisfactory day she had not been in New York
for almost five months, and as the rumors multiplied he became in-
creasingly anxious to see her. In February he took his vacation and
went down to Florida.

Palm Beach sprawled plump and opulent between the sparkling
sapphire of Lake Worth, flawed here and there by house-boats at
anchor, and the great turquoise bar of the Atlantic Ocean. The huge
bulks of the Breakers and the Royal Poinciana rose as twin paunches
from the bright level of the sand, and around them clustered the
Dancing Glade, Bradley's House of Chance, and a dozen modistes
and milliners with goods at triple prices from New York. Upon the
trellised veranda of the Breakers two hundred women stepped right,
stepped left, wheeled, and slid in that then celebrated calisthenic
known as the double-shuffle, while in half-time to the music two
thousand bracelets clicked up and down on two hundred arms.

At the Everglades Club after dark Paula and Lowell Thayer and



Anson and a casual fourth played bridge with hot cards. It seemed to
Anson that her kind, serious face was wan and tired she had been
around now for four, five, years. He had known her for three.

"Two spades."

"Cigarette? . . . Oh, I beg your pardon. By me."

"By."

"I'll double three spades."

There were a dozen tables of bridge in the room, which was filling
up with smoke. Anson's eyes met Paula's, held them persistently
even when Thayer's glance fell between them. . . .

"What was bid?" he asked abstractedly.

"Rose of Washington Square"
sang the young people in the corners :

"Im withering there
In basement air "

The smoke banked like fog, and the opening of a door filled the
room with blown swirls of ectoplasm. Little Bright Eyes streaked
past the tables seeking Mr. Conan Doyle among the Englishmen
who were posing as Englishmen about the lobby.

"You could cut it with a knife."

". . . cut it with a knife."

"... a knife."

At the end of the rubber Paula suddenly got up and spoke to Anson
in a tense, low voice. With scarcely a glance at Lowell Thayer, they
walked out the door and descended a long flight of stone steps in
a moment they were walking hand in hand along the moonlit beach.

"Darling, darling. . . ." They embraced recklessly, passionately,
in a shadow. . . . Then Paula drew back her face to let his lips say
what she wanted to hear she could feel the words forming as they
kissed again. . . . Again she broke away, listening, but as he pulled
her close once more she realized that he had said nothing only
"Darling! Darling!" in that deep, sad whisper that always made her
cry. Humbly, obediently, her emotions yielded to him and the tears
streamed down her face, but her heart kept on crying : "Ask me oh,
Anson, dearest, ask me ! "

"Paula. . . . Paula!"

The words wrung her heart like hands, and Anson, feeling her
tremble, knew that emotion was enough. He need say no more, com-
mit their destinies to no practical enigma. Why should he, when he
might hold her so, biding his own time, for another year forever?
He was considering them both, her more than himself. For a moment,
when she said suddenly that she must go back to her hotel, he hesi
tated, thinking, first, "This is the moment, after all," and then : "No,
let it wait she is mine. . . "

He had forgotten that Paula too was worn away inside with the
strain of three, years. Her mood passed forever in the night.

He went back to New York next morning filled with a certain
restless dissatisfaction. Late in April, without warning, he received
a telegram from Bar Harbor in which Paula told him that she was
engaged to Lowell Thayer, and that they would be married immedi-
ately in Boston. What he never really believed could happen had
happened at last.

Anson filled himself with whiskey that morning, and going to the
office, carried on his work without a break rather with a fear of
what would happen if he stopped. In the evening he went out as
usual, saying nothing of what had occurred ; he was cordial, humor-
ous, unabstracted. But one thing he could not help for three days,
in any place, in any company, he would suddenly bend his head into
his hands and cry like a child.

V

In 1922 when Anson went abroad with the junior partner to investi-
gate some London loans, the journey intimated that he was to be
taken into the firm. He was twenty-seven now, a little heavy without
being definitely stout, and with a manner older than his years. Old
people and young people liked him and trusted him, and mothers felt
safe when their daughters were in his charge, for he had a way, when
he came into a room, of putting himself on a footing with the oldest
and most conservative people there. "You and I," he seemed to say,
"we're solid. We understand."

He had an instinctive and rather charitable knowledge of the weak-
nesses of men and women, and, like a priest, it made him the more
concerned for the maintenance of outward forms. It was typical of
him that every Sunday morning he taught in a fashionable Episcopal
Sunday-school even though a cold shower and a quick change into
a cutaway coat were all that separated him from the wild night be-
fore.

After his father's death he was the practical head of his family,
and, in effect, guided the destinies of the younger children. Through
a complication his authority did not extend to his father's estate,
which was administrated by his Uncle Robert, who was the horsey
member of the family, a good-natured, hard-drinking member of that
set which centres about Wheatley Hills.

Uncle Robert and his wife, Edna, had been great friends of Anson's
youth, and the former was disappointed when his nephew's superior-
ity failed to take a horsey form. He backed him for a city club
which was the mostMifficult in America to enter one could only join
if one's family had "helped to build up New York" (or, in other
words, were rich before 1880) and when Anson, after his election,
neglected it for the Yale Club, Uncle Robert gave him a little talk
on the subject. But when on top of that Anson declined to enter
Robert Hunter's own conservative and somewhat neglected broker-
age house, his manner grew cooler. Like a primary teacher who has
taught all he knew, he slipped out of Anson's life.

There were so many friends in Anson's life scarcely one for
whom he had not done some unusual kindness and scarcely one whom
he did not occasionally embarrass by his bursts of rough conversation
or his habit of getting drunk whenever and however he liked. It
annoyed him when any one else blundered in that regard about his
own lapses he was always humorous. Odd things happened to him
and he told them with infectious laughter.

I was working in New York that spring, and I used to lunch with
him at the Yale Club, which my university was sharing until the
completion of our own. I had read of Paula's marriage, and one after-
noon, when I asked him about her, something moved him to tell me
the story. After that he frequently invited me to family dinners at
his house and behaved as though there was a special relation between
us, as though with his confidence a little of that consuming memory
had passed into me.

I found that despite the trusting mothers, his attitude toward girls
was not indiscriminately protective. It was up to the girl if she
showed an inclination toward looseness, she must take care of her-
self, even with him.

"Life," he would explain sometimes, "has made a cynic of me."

By life he meant Paula. Sometimes, especially when he was drink-
ing, it became a little twisted in his mind, and he thought that she
had callously thrown him over.

This "cynicism," or rather his realization that naturally fast girls
were not worth sparing, led to his affair with Dolly Karger, It wasn't
his only affair in those years, but it came nearest to touching him
deeply, and it had a profound effect upon his attitude toward life.

Dolly was the daughter of a notorious "publicist" who had married
into society. She herself grew up into the Junior League, came out
at the Plaza, and went to the Assembly ; and only a few old families
like the Hunters could question whether or not she "belonged," for
her picture was often in the papers, and she had more enviable atten-
tion than many girls who undoubtedly did. She was dark-haired, with
carmine lips and a high, lovely color, which she concealed under
pinkish-gray powder all through the first year out, because high color
was unfashionable Victorian-pale was the thing to be. She wore
black, severe suits and stood with her hands in her pockets leaning
a little forward, with a humorous restraint on her face. She danced
exquisitely better than anything she liked to dance better than
anything except making love. Since she was ten she had always been
, and, usually, with some boy who didn't respond to her. Those
there were many bored her after a brief encounter,
but for her failures she reserved the warmest spot in her heart.
When she met them she would always try once more sometimes she
succeeded, more often she failed.

It never occurred to this gypsy of the unattainable that there was
a certain resemblance in those who refused to love her they shared
a hard intuition that saw through to her weakness, not a weakness
of emotion but a weakness of rudder. Anson perceived this when he
first met her, less than a month after Paula's marriage. He was drink-
ing rather heavily, and he pretended for a week that he was falling
in love with her. Then he dropped her abruptly and forgot imme-
diately he took up the commanding position in her heart.

Like so many girls of that day Dolly was slackly and indiscreetly
wild. The unconventionality of a slightly older generation had been
simply one facet of a post-war movement to discredit obsolete man-
ners Dolly's was both older and shabbier, and she saw in Anson the
two extremes which the emotionally shiftless woman seeks, an
abandon to indulgence alternating with a protective strength. In
his character she felt both the sybarite and the solid rock, and these
two satisfied every need of her nature.

She felt that it was going to be difficult, but she mistook the reason
she thought that Anson and his family expected a more spectacu-
lar marriage, but she guessed immediately that her advantage lay in
his tendency to drink.

They met at the large debutante dances, but as her infatuation
increased they managed to be more and more together. Like most
mothers, Mrs. Karger believed that Anson was exceptionally reliable,
so she allowed Dolly to go with him to distant country clubs and
suburban houses without inquiring closely into their activities or
questioning her explanations when they came in late. At first these
explanations might have been accurate, but Dolly's worldly ideas
of capturing Anson were soon engulfed in the rising sweep of her
emotion. Kisses in the back of taxis and motor-cars were no longer
enough ; they did a curious thing :

They dropped out of their world for a while and made another
world just beneath it where Anson's tippling and Dolly's irregular
hours would be less noticed and commented on. It was composed,
this world, of varying elements several of Anson's Yale friends and
their wives, two or three young brokers and bond salesmen and a
handful of unattached men, fresh from college, with money and a
propensity to dissipation. What this world lacked in spaciousness
and scale it made up for by allowing them a liberty that it scarcely
permitted itself. Moreover, it centred around them and permitted
Dolly the pleasure of a faint condescension a pleasure which Anson,
whose whole life was a condescension from the certitudes of his
childhood, was unable to share.

He was not in love with her, and in the long feverish winter of
their affair he frequently told her so. In the spring he was weary
he wanted to renew his life at some other source moreover, he saw
that either he must break with her now or accept the responsibility
of a definite seduction. Her family's encouraging attitude precipitated
his decision one evening when Mr. Karger knocked discreetly at
the library door to announce that he had left a bottle of old brandy
in the dining-room, Anson felt that life was hemming him in. That
night he wrote her a short letter in which he told her that he was
going on his vacation, and that in view of all the circumstances they
had better meet no more.

It was June. His family had closed up the house and gone to the
country, so he was living temporarily at the Yale Club. I had heard
about his affair with Dolly as it developed accounts salted with
humor, for he despised unstable women, and granted them no place
in the social edifice in which he believed and when he told me that
night that he was definitely breaking with her I was glad. I had seen
Dolly here and there, and each time with a feeling of pity at the
hopelessness of her struggle, and of shame at knowing so much about
her that I had no right to know. She was what is known as "a pretty
little thing," but there was a certain recklessness which rather fas-
cinated me. Her dedication to the goddess of waste would have been
less obvious had she been less spirited she would most certainly
throw herself away, but I was glad when I heard that the sacrifice
would not be consummated in my sight.

Anson was going to leave the letter of farewell at her house next
morning. It was one of the few houses left open in the Fifth Avenue
district, and he knew that the Kargers, acting upon erroneous in-
formation from Dolly, had foregone a trip abroad to give their daugh-
ter her chance. As he stepped out the door of the Yale Club into
Madison Avenue the postman passed him, and he followed back
inside. The first letter that caught his eye was in Dolly's hand.

He knew what it would be a lonely and tragic monologue, full
of the reproaches he knew, the invoked memories, the "I wonder
if's" all the immemorial intimacies that he had communicated to
Paula Legendre in what seemed another age. Thumbing over some
bills, he brought it on top again and opened it. To his surprise it was
a short, somewhat formal note, which said that Dolly would be un-
able to go to the country with him for the week-end, because Perry
Hull from Chicago had unexpectedly come to town. It added that
Anson had brought this on himself : " if I felt that you loved me
as I love you I would go with you at any time, any place, but Perry
is so nice, and he so much wants me to marry him "

Anson smiled contemptuously he had had experience with such
decoy epistles. Moreover, he knew how Dolly had labored over this
plan, probably sent for the faithful Perry and calculated the time of
his arrival even labored over the note so that it would make him
jealous without driving him away. Like most compromises, it had
neither force nor vitality but only a timorous despair.

Suddenly he was angry. He sat down in the lobby and read it
again. Then he went to the phone, called Dolly and told her in his
clear, compelling voice that he had received her note and would call
for her at five o'clock as they had previously planned. Scarcely wait-
ing for the pretended uncertainty of her "Perhaps I can see you for
an hour," he hung up the receiver and went down to his office. On
the way he tore his own letter into bits and dropped it in the street.

He was not jealous she meant nothing to him but at her pa-
thetic ruse everything stubborn and self-indulgent in him came to
the surface. It was a presumption from a mental inferior and it could
not be overlooked. If she wanted to know to whom she belonged she
would see.

He was on the door-step at quarter past five. Dolly was dressed
for the street, and he listened in silence to the paragraph of "I can
only see you for an hour/' which she had begun on the phone.

"Put on your hat, Dolly," he said, "we'll take a walk."

They strolled up Madison Avenue and over to Fifth while Anson's
shirt dampened upon his portly body in the deep heat. He talked
little, scolding her, making no love to her, but before they had walked
six blocks she was his again, apologizing for the note, offering not to
see Perry at all as an atonement, offering anything. She thought that
he had come because he was beginning to love her.

"I'm hot," he said when they reached yist Street. "This is a winter
suit. If I stop by the house and change, would you mind waiting for
me down-stairs? I'll only be a minute."

She was happy ; the intimacy of his being hot, of any physical fact
about him, thrilled her. When they came to the iron-grated door and
Anson took out his key she experienced a sort of delight.

Down-stairs it was dark, and after he ascended in the lift Dolly
raised a curtain and looked out through opaque lace at the houses
over the way. She heard the lift machinery stop, and with the notion
of teasing him pressed the button that brought it down. Then on
what was more than an impulse she got into it and sent it up to what
she guessed was his floor.

"Anson," she called, laughing a little.

"Just a minute," he answered from his bedroom . . . then after a
brief delay : "Now you can come in."

He had changed and was buttoning his vest.

"This is my room," he said lightly. "How do you like it?"

She caught sight of Paula's picture on the wall and stared at it in
fascination, just as Paula had stared at the pictures of Anson's child-
ish sweethearts five years before. She knew something about Paula
sometimes she tortured herself with fragments of the story.

Suddenly she came close to Anson, raising her arms. They em-
braced. Outside the area window a soft artificial twilight already hov-
ered, though the sun was still bright on a back roof across the way.
In half an hour the room would be quite dark. The uncalculated op-
portunity overwhelmed them, made them both breathless, and they
,clung more closely. It was imminent, inevitable. Still holding one
another, they raised their heads their eyes fell together upon
Paula's picture, staring down at them from the wall.

Suddenly Anson dropped his arms, and sitting down at his desk
tried the drawer with a bunch of keys.

"Like a drink?" he asked in a gruff voice.

"No, Anson."

He poured himself half a tumbler of whiskey, swallowed it, and
then opened the door into the hall.

"Come on," he said.

Dolly hesitated.

"Anson I'm going to the country with you tonight, after all. You
understand that, don't you?"

"Of course," he answered brusquely.

In Dolly's car they rode on to Long Island, closer in their emo-
tions than they had ever been before. They knew what would hap-
pen not with Paula's face to remind them that something was lack-
ing, but when they were alone in the still, hot Long Island night
they did not care.

The estate in Port Washington where they were to spend the week-
end belonged to a cousin of Anson's who had married a Montana
copper operator. An interminable drive began at the lodge and
twisted under imported poplar saplings toward a huge, pink Spanish
house. Anson had often visited there before.

After dinner they danced at the Linx Club. About midnight Anson
assured himself that his cousins would not leave before two then
he explained that Dolly was tired ; he would take her home and re-
turn to the dance later. Trembling a little with excitement, they got
into a borrowed car together and drove to Port Washington. As they
reached the lodge he stopped and spoke to the night-watchman.

"When are you making a round, Carl ?"

"Right away."

"Then you'll be here till everybody's in?"

"Yes, sir."

"All right. Listen : if any automobile, no matter whose it is, turns
in at this gate, I want you to phone the house immediately." He put
a five-dollar bill into Carl's hand. "Is that clear?"

"Yes, Mr. Anson." Being of the Old World, he neither winked nor
smiled. Yet Dolly sat with her face turned slightly away.

Anson had a key. Once inside he poured a drink for both of them
Dolly left hers untouched then he ascertained definitely the loca-
tion of the phone, and found that it was within easy hearing distance
of their rooms, both of which were on the first floor.

Five minutes later he knocked at the door of Dolly's room.

"Anson?" He went in, closing the door behind him. She was in
bed, leaning up anxiously with elbows on the pillow ; sitting beside
her he took her in his arms.

"Anson, darling."

He didn't answer.

"Anson. . . . Anson! I love you. . . . Say you love me. Say it
now can't you say it now? Even if you don't mean it?"

He did not listen. Over her head he perceived that the picture of
Paula was hanging here upon this wall.

He got up and went close to it. The frame gleamed faintly with
thrice-reflected moonlight within was a blurred shadow of a face
that he saw he did not know. Almost sobbing, he turned around and
stared with abomination at the little figure on the bed.

"This is all foolishness," he said thickly. "I don't know what I was
thinking about. I don't love you and you'd better wait for somebody
that loves you. I don't love you a bit, can't you understand?"

His voice broke, and he went hurriedly out. Back in the salon he
was pouring himself a drink with uneasy fingers, when the front door
opened suddenly, and his cousin came in.

"Why, Anson, I hear Dolly's sick," she began solicitously. "I hear
she's sick. . . ."

"It was nothing," he interrupted, raising his voice so that it would
carry into Dolly's room. "She was a little tired. She went to bed."

For a long time afterward Anson believed that a protective God
sometimes interfered in human affairs. But Dolly Karger, lying
awake and staring at the ceiling, never again believed in anything
again.

VI

When Dolly married during the following autumn, Anson was in
London on business. Like Paula's marriage, it was sudden, but it
affected him in a different way. At first he felt that it was funny,
and had an inclination to laugh when he thought of it. Later it de-
pressed him it made him feel old.

There was something repetitive about it why, Paula and Dolly
had belonged to different generations. He had a foretaste of the sen-
sation of a man of forty who hears that the daughter of an old
flame has married. He wired congratulations and, as was not the
case with Paula, they were sincere he had never really hoped that
Paula would be happy.

When he returned to New York, he was made a partner in the
firm, and, as his responsibilities increased, he had less time on his
hands. The refusal of a life-insurance company to issue him a policy
made such an impression on him that he stopped drinking for a year,
and claimed that he felt better physically, though I think he missed
the convivial recounting of those Celliniesque adventures which, in
his early twenties, had played such a part in his life. But he never
abandoned the Yale Club. He was a figure there, a personality, and
the tendency of his class, who were now seven years out of college,,
to drift away to more sober haunts was checked by his presence.

His day was never too full nor his mind too weary to give any sort
of aid to any one who asked it. What had been done at first through
pride and superiority had become a habit and a passion. And there
was always something a younger brother in trouble at New Haven,
a quarrel to be patched up between a friend and his wife, a position
to be found for this man, an investment for that. But his specialty
was the solving of problems for young married people. Young mar-
ried people fascinated him and their apartments were almost sacred
to him he knew the story of their love-affair, advised them where
to live and how, and remembered their babies' names. Toward young
wives his attitude was circumspect : he never abused the trust which
their husbands strangely enough in view of his unconcealed irregu-
larities invariably reposed in him.

He came to take a vicarious pleasure in happy marriages, and to
be inspired to an almost equally pleasant melancholy by those that
went astray. Not a season passed that he did not witness the collapse
of an affair that perhaps he himself had fathered. When Paula was
divorced and almost immediately remarried to another Bostonian,
he talked about her to me all one afternoon. He would never love any
one as he had loved Paula, but he insisted that he no longer cared.
"I'll never marry," he came to say; "I've seen too much of it,
and I know a happy marriage is a very rare thing. Besides, I'm too
old."

But he did believe in marriage. Like all men who spring from a
happy and successful marriage, he believed in it passionately noth-
ing he had seen would change his belief, his cynicism dissolved upon
it like air. But he did really believe he was too old. At twenty-eight
he began to accept with equanimity the prospect of marrying with-
out romantic love ; he resolutely chose a New York girl of his own
class, pretty, intelligent, congenial, above reproach and set about
falling in love with her. The things he had said to Paula with sin-
cerity, to other girls with grace, he could no longer say at all without
smiling, or with the force necessary to convince.

"When I'm forty," he told his friends, "I'll be ripe. I'll fall for
some chorus girl like the rest."

Nevertheless, he persisted in his attempt. His mother wanted to see
him married, and he could now well afford it he had a seat on the
Stock Exchange, and his earned income came to twenty-five thousand
a year. The idea was agreeable : when his friends he spent most of
his time with the set he and Dolly had evolved closed themselves in
behind domestic doors at night, he no longer rejoiced in his freedom.
He even wondered if he should have married Dolly. Not even Paula
had loved him more, and he was learning the rarity, in a single life,
of encountering true emotion.

Just as this mood began to creep over him a disquieting story
reached his ear. His Aunt Edna, a woman just this side of forty, was
carrying on an open intrigue with a dissolute, hard-drinking young
man named Gary Sloane. Every one knew of it except Anson's Uncle
Robert, who for fifteen years had talked long in clubs and taken his
wife for granted.

Anson heard the story again and again with increasing annoyance.
Something of his old feeling for his uncle came back to him, a feel-
ing that was more than personal, a reversion toward that family soli-
darity on which he had based his pride. His intuition singled out the
essential point of the affair, which was that his uncle shouldn't be
hurt. It was his first experiment in unsolicited meddling, but with
his knowledge of Edna's character he felt that he could handle the
matter better than a district judge or his uncle.

His uncle was in Hot Springs. Anson traced down the sources of
the scandal so that there should be no possibility of mistake and
then he called Edna and asked her to lunch with him at the Plaza
next day. Something in his tone must have frightened her, for she
was reluctant, but he insisted, putting off the date until she had no
excuse for refusing.
She met him at the appointed time in the Plaza lobby, a lovely,
faded, gray-eyed blonde in a coat of Russian sable. Five great rings,
cold with diamonds and emeralds, sparkled on her slender hands. It
occurred to Anson that it was his father's intelligence and not his
uncle's that had earned the fur and the stones, the rich brilliance
that buoyed up her passing beauty.

Though Edna scented his hostility, she was unprepared for the
directness of his approach.

"Edna, I'm astonished at the way you've been acting," he said in
a strong, frank voice. "At first I couldn't believe it."

"Believe what?" she demanded sharply.

"You needn't pretend with me, Edna. I'm talking about Gary
Sloane. Aside from any other consideration, I didn't think you could
treat Uncle Robert "

"Now look here, Anson " she began angrily, but his peremptory
voice broke through hers :

" and your children in such a way. You've been married eighteen
years, and you're old enough to know better."

"You can't talk to me like that ! You "

"Yes, I can. Uncle Robert has always been my best friend." He
was tremendously moved. He felt a real distress about his uncle,
about his three young cousins.

Edna stood up, leaving her crab-flake cocktail untasted.

"This is the silliest thing "

"Very well, if you won't listen to me I'll go to Uncle Robert and
tell him the whole story he's bound to hear it sooner or later. And
afterward I'll go to old Moses Sloane."

Edna faltered back into her chair.

"Don't talk so loud," she begged him. Her eyes blurred with
tears. "You have no idea how your voice carries. You might have
chosen a less public place to make all these crazy accusations."

He didn't answer.

"Oh, you never liked me, I know," she went on. "You're just tak-
ing advantage of some silly gossip to try and break up the only in-
teresting friendship I've ever had. What did I ever do to make you
hate me so?"

Still Anson waited. There would be the appeal to his chivalry, then
to his pity, finally to his superior sophistication when he had
shouldered his way through all these there would be admissions, and
he could come to grips with her. By being silent, by being impervious,
by returning constantly to his main weapon, which was his own true
emotion, he bullied her into frantic despair as the luncheon hour
slipped away. At two o'clock she took out a mirror and a handker-
chief, shined away the marks of her tears and powdered the slight
hollows where they had lain. She had agreed to meet him at her own
house at five.

When he arrived she was stretched on a chaise-longue which was
covered with cretonne for the summer, and the tears he had called up
at luncheon seemed still to be standing in her eyes. Then he was
aware of Gary Sloane's dark anxious presence upon the cold hearth.

"What's this idea of yours?" broke out Sloane immediately. "I
understand you invited Edna to lunch and then threatened her on
the basis of some cheap scandal."

Anson sat down.

"I have no reason to think it's only scandal."

"I hear you're going to take it to Robert Hunter, and to my
father."

Anson nodded.

"Either you break it off or I will," he said.

"What God damned business is it of yours, Hunter ?"

"Don't lose your temper, Gary," said Edna nervously. "It's only
a question of showing him how absurd "

"For one thing, it's my name that's being handed around," inter-
rupted Anson. "That's all that concerns you, Gary."

"Edna isn't a member of your family."

"She most certainly is ! " His anger mounted. "Why she owes this
house and the rings on her fingers to my father's brains. When Uncle
Robert married her she didn't have a penny."

They all looked at the rings as if they had a significant bearing on
the situation. Edna made a gesture to take them from her hand.

"I guess they're not the only rings in the world," said Sloane.

"Oh, this is absurd," cried Edna. "Anson, will you listen to me?
I've found out how the silly story started. It was a maid I discharged
who went right to the Chilicheffs all these Russians pump things
out of their servants and then put a false meaning on them." She
brought down her fist angrily on the table : "And after Robert lent
them the limousine for a whole month when we were South last
winter "

"Do you see ?" demanded Sloane eagerly. "This maid got hold of
the wrong end of the thing. She knew that Edna and I were friends,
and she carried it to the Chilicheffs. In Russia they assume that if a
man and a woman "

He enlarged the theme to a disquisition upon social relations in
the Caucasus.

"If that's the case it better be explained to Uncle Robert," said
Anson dryly, "so that when the rumors do reach him he'll know
they're not true."

Adopting the method he had followed with Edna at luncheon he
let them explain it all away. He knew that they were guilty and that
presently they would cross the line from explanation into justifica-
tion and convict themselves more definitely than he could ever do.
By seven they had taken the desperate step of telling him the truth
Robert Hunter's neglect, Edna's empty life, the casual dalliance
that had flamed up into passion but like so many true stories it
had the misfortune of being old, and its enfeebled body beat help-
lessly against the armor of Anson's will. The threat to go to Sloane's
father sealed their helplessness, for the latter, a retired cotton broker
out of Alabama, was a notorious fundamentalist who controlled his
son by a rigid allowance and the promise that at his next vagary the
allowance would stop forever.

They dined at a small French restaurant, and the discussion con-
tinued at one time Sloane resorted to physical threats, a little later
they were both imploring him to give them time. But Anson was
obdurate. He saw that Edna was breaking up, and that her spirit
must not be refreshed by any renewal of their passion.

At two o'clock in a small night-club on 53d Street, Edna's nerves
suddenly collapsed, and she cried to go home. Sloane had been drink-
ing heavily all evening, and he was faintly maudlin, leaning on the
table and weeping a little with his face in his hands. Quickly
Anson gave them his terms. Sloane was to leave town for six months,
and he must be gone within forty-eight hours. When he returned
there was to be no resumption of the affair, but at the end of a year
Edna might, if she wished, tell Robert Hunter that she wanted a
divorce and go about it in the usual way.

He paused, gaining confidence from their faces for his final word.
"Or there's another thing you can do," he said slowly, "if Edna
wants to leave her children, there's nothing I can do to prevent your
running off together."

"I want to go home!" cried Edna again. "Oh, haven't you done
enough to us for one day?"

Outside it was dark, save for a blurred glow from Sixth Avenue
down the street. In that light those two who had been lovers looked
for the last time into each other's tragic faces, realizing that between
them there was not enough youth and strength to avert their eternal
parting. Sloane walked suddenly off down the street and Anson
tapped a dozing taxi-driver on the arm.

It was almost four; there was a patient flow of cleaning water
along the ghostly pavement of Fifth Avenue, and the shadows of
two night women flitted over the dark facade of St. Thomas's church.
Then the desolate shrubbery of Central Park where Anson had
often played as a child, and the mounting numbers, significant as
names, of the marching streets. This was his city, he thought, where
his name had flourished through five generations. No change could
alter the permanence of its place here, for change itself was the
essential substratum by wliich he and those of his name identified
themselves with the spirit of New York^ Resourcefulness and a
powerful will for his threats in weaker hands would have been
less than nothing had beaten the gathering dust from his uncle's
name, from the name of his family, from even this shivering figure
that sat beside him in the car.

Gary Sloane's body was found next morning on the lower shelf of
a pillar of Queensboro Bridge. In the darkness and in his excitement
he had thought that it was the water flowing black beneath him, but
in less than a second it made no possible difference unless he had
planned to think one last thought of Edna, and call out her name
as he struggled feebly in the water.

VII

Anson never blamed himself for his part in this affair the situa-
tion which brought it about had not been of his making. But the
just suffer with the unjust, and he found that his oldest and some-
how his most precious friendship was over. He never knew what
distorted story Edna told, but he was welcome in his uncle's house
no longer.

Just before Christmas Mrs. Hunter retired to a select Episcopal
heaven, and Anson became the responsible head of his family. An
unmarried aunt who had lived with them for years ran the house,
and attempted with helpless inefficiency to chaperone the younger
girls. All the children were less self-reliant than Anson, more con-
ventional both in their virtues and in their shortcomings. Mrs.
Hunter's death had postponed the debut of one daughter and the
wedding of another. Also it had taken something deeply material
from all of them, for with her passing the quiet, expensive superi-
ority of the Hunters came to an end.

For one thing, the estate, considerably diminished by two inherit-
ance taxes and soon to be divided among six children, was not a
notable fortune any more. Anson saw a tendency in his youngest
sisters to speak rather respectfully of families that hadn't "existed"
twenty years ago. His own feeling of precedence was not echoed in
them sometimes they were conventionally snobbish, that was all.
For another thing, this was the last summer they would spend on
the Connecticut estate ; the clamor against it was too loud : "Who
wants to waste the best months of the year shut up in that dead old
town ?" Reluctantly he yielded the house would go into the market
in the fall, and next summer they would rent a smaller place in



Westchester County. It was a step down from the expensive sim-
plicity of his father's idea, and, while he sympathized with the
revolt, it also annoyed him; during his mother's lifetime he had
gone up there at least every other week-end even in the gayest
summers.

Yet he himself was part of this change, and his strong instinct
for life had turned him in his twenties from the hollow obsequies
of that abortive leisure class. He did not see this clearly he still
felt that there was a norm, a standard of society. But there was no
norm, it was doubtful if there ever had been a true norm in New
York. The few who still paid and fought to enter a particular set
succeeded only to find that as a society it scarcely functioned or,
what was more alarming, that the Bohemia from which they fled sat
above them at table.

At twenty-nine Anson's chief concern was his own growing loneli-
ness. He was sure now that he would never marry. The number of
weddings at which he had officiated as best man or usher was past
all counting there was a drawer at home that bulged with the
official neckties of this or that wedding-party, neckties standing
for romances that had not endured a year, for couples who had passed
completely from his life. Scarf-pins, gold pencils, cuff-buttons, pres-
ents from a generation of grooms had passed through his jewel-box
and been lost and with every ceremony he was less and less able
to imagine himself in the groom's place. Under his hearty good-will
toward all those marriages there was despair about his own.

And as he neared thirty he became not a little depressed at the
inroads that marriage, especially lately, had made upon his friend-
ships. Groups of people had a disconcerting tendency to dissolve
and disappear. The men from his own college and it was upon
them he had expended the most time and affection were the most
elusive of all. Most of them were drawn deep into domesticity, two
were dead, one lived abroad, one was in Hollywood writing con-
tinuities for pictures that Anson went faithfully to see.

Most of them, however, were permanent commuters with an
intricate family life centring around some suburban country
club, and it was from these that he felt his estrangement most
keenly.

In the early days of their married life they had all needed him ;
he gave them advice about their slim finances, he exorcised their
doubts about the advisability of bringing a baby into two rooms
and a bath, especially he stood for the great world outside. But now
their financial troubles were in the past and the fearfully expected
child had evolved into an absorbing family. They were always glad
to see old Anson, but they dressed up for him and tried to impress
him with their present importance, and kept their troubles to them-
selves. They needed him no longer.

A few weeks before his thirtieth birthday the last of his early
and intimate friends was married. Anson acted in his usual role of
best man, gave his usual silver tea-service, and went down to the
usual Homeric to say good-by. It was a hot Friday afternoon in
May, and as he walked from the pier he realized that Saturday
closing had begun and he was free until Monday morning.

"Go where?" he asked himself.

The Yale Club, of course; bridge until dinner, then four or five
raw cocktails in somebody's room and a pleasant confused evening.
He regretted that this afternoon's groom wouldn't be along they
had always been able to cram so much into such nights : they knew
how to attach women and how to get rid of them, how much con-
sideration any girl deserved from their intelligent hedonism. A party
was an adjusted thing you took certain girls to certain places and
spent just so much on their amusement; you drank a little, not
much, more than you ought to drink, and at a certain time in the
morning you stood up and said you were going home. You avoided
college boys, sponges, future engagements, fights, sentiment, and
indiscretions. That was the way it was done. All the rest was dissi-
pation.

In the morning you were never violently sorry you made no
resolutions, but if you had overdone it and your heart was slightly
out of order, you went on the wagon for a few days without saying
anything about it, and waited until an accumulation of nervous
boredom projected you into another party.

The lobby of the Yale Club was unpopulated. In the bar three
very young alumni looked up at him, momentarily and without
curiosity.

"Hello, there, Oscar," he said to the bartender. "Mr. Cahill been
around this afternoon?"

"Mr. Cahiirs gone to New Haven."

"Oh . . . that so?"

"Gone to the ball game. Lot of men gone up."

Anson looked once again into the lobby, considered for a moment,
and then walked out and over to Fifth Avenue. From the broad win-
dow of one of his clubs one that he had scarcely visited in five
years a gray man with watery eyes stared down at him. Anson
looked quickly away that figure sitting in vacant resignation, in
supercilious solitude, depressed him. He stopped and, retracing his
steps, started over 47th Street toward Teak Warden's apartment.
Teak and his wife had once been his most familiar friends it was
a household where he and Dolly Karger had been used to go in
the days of their affair. But Teak had taken to drink, and his wife
had remarked publicly that Anson was a bad influence on him. The
remark reached Anson in an exaggerated form when it was finally
cleared up, the delicate spell of intimacy was broken, never to be
renewed.

"Is Mr. Warden at home ?" he inquired.

"They Ve gone to the country."

The fact unexpectedly cut at him. They were gone to the country
and he hadn't known. Two years before he would have known the
date, the hour, come up at the last moment for a final drink,
and planned his first visit to them. Now they had gone without
a word.

Anson looked at his watch and considered a week-end with his
family, but the only train was a local that would jolt through the
aggressive heat for three hours. And to-morrow in the country, and
Sunday he was in no mood for porch-bridge with polite under-
graduates, and dancing after dinner at a rural roadhouse, a diminu-
tive of gaiety which his father had estimated too well.

"Oh, no," he said to himself. . . . "No."

He was a dignified, impressive young man, rather stout now, but
otherwise unmarked by dissipation. He could have been cast for a
pillar of something at times you were sure it was not society, at
others nothing else for the law, for the church. He stood for a few
minutes motionless on the sidewalk in front of a 47th Street apart-
ment-house; for almost the first time in his life he had nothing
whatever to do.

Then he began to walk briskly up Fifth Avenue, as if he had just
been reminded of an important engagement there. The necessity of
dissimulation is one of the few characteristics that we share with
dogs, and I think of Anson on that day as some well-bred specimen
who had been disappointed at a familiar back door. He was going
to see Nick, once a fashionable bartender in demand at all private
dances, and now employed in cooling non-alcoholic champagne
among the labyrinthine cellars of the Plaza Hotel.

"Nick," he said, "what's happened to everything?"

"Dead," Nick said.

"Make me a whiskey sour." Anson handed a pint bottle over the
counter. "Nick, the girls are different ; I had a little girl in Brook-
lyn and she got married last week without letting me know."

"That a fact ? Ha-ha-ha," responded Nick diplomatically. "Slipped
it over on you."

"Absolutely," said Anson. "And I was out with her the night
before."

"Ha-ha-ha," said Nick, "ha-ha-ha!"
"Do you remember the wedding, Nick, in Hot Springs where I
had the waiters and the musicians singing 'God save the King'?"

"Now where was that, Mr. Hunter?" Nick concentrated doubt-
fully. "Seems to me that was "

"Next time they were back for more, and I began to wonder how
much I'd paid them," continued Anson.

" seems to me that was at Mr. Trenholm's wedding."

"Don't know him," said Anson decisively. He was offended that
a strange name should intrude upon his reminiscences; Nick per-
ceived this.

"Na aw " he admitted, "I ought to know that. It was one of
your crowd Brakins . . . Baker "

"Bicker Baker," said Anson responsively. "They put me in a
hearse after it was over and covered me up with flowers and drove
me away."

"Ha-ha-ha," said Nick. "Ha-ha-ha."

Nick's simulation of the old family servant paled presently and
Anson went up-stairs to the lobby. He looked around his eyes met
the glance of an unfamiliar clerk at the desk, then fell upon a flower
from the morning's marriage hesitating in the mouth of a brass cus-
pidor. He went out and walked slowly toward the blood-red sun
over Columbus Circle. Suddenly he turned around and, retracing his
steps to the Plaza, immured himself in a telephone-booth.

Later he said that he tried to get me three times that afternoon,
that he tried every one who might be in New York men and girls
he had not seen for years, an artist's model of his college days whose
faded number was still in his address book Central told him that
even the exchange existed no longer. At length his quest roved into
the country, and he held brief disappointing conversations with
emphatic butlers and maids. So-and-so was out, riding, swimming,
playing golf, sailed to Europe last week. Who shall I say phoned?

It was intolerable that he should pass the evening alone the
private reckonings which one plans for a moment of leisure lose
every charm when the solitude is enforced. There were always women
of a sort, but the ones he knew had temporarily vanished, and to pass
a New York evening in the hired company of a stranger never
occurred to him he would have considered that that was something
shameful and secret, the diversion of a travelling salesman in a
strange town.

Anson paid the telephone bill the girl tried unsuccessfully to joke
with him about its size and for the second time that afternoon
started to leave the Plaza and go he knew not where. Near the revolv-
ing door the figure of a woman, obviously with child, stood side-
ways to the light a sheer beige cape fluttered at her shoulders when
the door turned and, each time, she looked impatiently toward it as
if she were weary of waiting. At the first sight of her a strong
nervous thrill of familiarity went over him, but not until he was
within five feet of her did he realize that it was Paula.

"Why, Anson Hunter!"

His heart turned over.

"Why, Paula "

"Why, this is wonderful. I can't believe it, Anson ! "

She took both his hands, and he saw in the freedom of the gesture
that the memory of him had lost poignancy to her. But not to him
he felt that old mood that she evoked in him stealing over his brain,
that gentleness with which he had always met her optimism as if
afraid to mar its surface.

"We're at Rye for the summer. Pete had to come East on business
you know of course I'm Mrs. Peter Hagerty now so we brought
the children and took a house. You've got to come out and see us."

"Can I?" he asked directly. "When?"

"When you like. Here's Pete." The revolving door functioned,
giving up a fine tall man of thirty with a tanned face and a trirn
mustache. His immaculate fitness made a sharp contrast with
Anson 's increasing bulk, which was obvious under the faintly tight
cut-away coat.

"You oughtn't to be standing," said Hagerty to his wife. "Let's
sit down here." He indicated lobby chairs, but Paula hesitated.

"I've got to go right home," she said. "Anson, why don't you
why don't you come out and have dinner with us to-night? We're
just getting settled, but if you can stand that "

Hagerty confirmed the invitation cordially.

"Come out for the night."

Their car waited in front of the hotel, and Paula with a tired
gesture sank back against silk cushions in the corner.

"There's so much I want to talk to you about," she said, "it
seems hopeless."

"I want to hear about you."

"Well" she smiled at Hagerty "that would take a long time
too. I have three children by my first marriage. The oldest is five,
then four, then three." She smiled again. "I didn't waste much time
having them, did I ?"

"Boys?"

"A boy and two girls. Then oh, a lot of things happened, and I
got a divorce in Paris a year ago and married Pete. That's all
except that I'm awfully happy."

In Rye they drove up to a large house near the Beach Club, from
which there issued presently three dark, slim children who broke
from an English governess and approached them with an esoteric
cry. Abstractedly and with difficulty Paula took each one into her
arms, a caress which they accepted stiffly, as they had evidently been
told not to bump into Mummy. Even against their fresh faces
Paula's skin showed scarcely any weariness for all her physical
languor she seemed younger than when he had last seen her at Palm
Beach seven years ago.

At dinner she was preoccupied, and afterward, during the homage
to the radio, she lay with closed eyes on the sofa, until Anson won-
dered if his presence at this time were not an intrusion. But at nine
o'clock, when Hagerty rose and said pleasantly that he was going
to leave them by themselves for a while, she began to talk slowly
about herself and the past.

"My first baby," she said "the one we call Darling, the biggest
little girl I wanted to die when I knew I was going to have her,
because Lowell was like a stranger to me. It didn't seem as though
she could be my own. I wrote you a letter and tore it up. Oh, you
were so bad to me, Anson."

It was the dialogue again, rising and falling. Anson felt a sudden
quickening of memory.

"Weren't you engaged once?" she asked "a girl named Dolly
something?"

"I wasn't ever engaged. I tried to be engaged, but I never loved
anybody but you, Paula."

"Oh," she said. Then after a moment : "This baby is the first one
I ever really wanted. You see, I'm in love now at last."

He didn't answer, shocked at the treachery of her remembrance.
She must have seen that the "at last" bruised him, for she continued :

"I was infatuated with you, Anson you could make me do any-
thing you liked. But we wouldn't have been happy. I'm not smart
enough for you. I don't like things to be complicated like you do."
She paused. "You'll never settle down," she said.

The phrase struck at him from behind it was an accusation that
of all accusations he had never merited.

"I could settle down if women were different," he said. "If I
didn't understand so much about them, if women didn't spoil you for
other women, if they had only a little pride. If I could go to sleep
for a while and wake up into a home that was really mine why,
that's what I'm made for, Paula, that's what women have seen in
me and liked in me. It's only that I can't get through the prelimi-
naries any more."

Hagerty came in a little before eleven; after a whiskey Paula
stood up and announced that she was going to bed. She went over
and stood by her husband.



"Where did you go, dearest?" she demanded.

"I had a drink with Ed Saunders."

"I was worried. I thought maybe you'd run away."

She rested her head against his coat.

"He's sweet, isn't he, Anson?" she demanded.

"Absolutely," said Anson, laughing.

She raised her face to her husband.

"Well, I'm ready," she said. She turned to Anson: "Do you want
to see our family gymnastic stunt?"

"Yes," he said in an interested voice.

"All right. Here we go!"

Hagerty picked her up easily in his arms.

"This is called the family acrobatic stunt," said Paula. "He can
ries me up-stiars. Isn't it sweet of him?"

"Yes," said Anson.

Hagerty bent his head slightly until his face touched Paula's.

"And I love him," she said. "I've just been telling you, haven't
I, Anson?"

"Yes," he said.

"He's the dearest thing that ever lived in this world ; aren't you,
darling? . . . Well, good night. Here we go. Isn't he strong?"

"Yes," Anson said.

"You'll find a pair of Pete's pajamas laid out for you. Sweet
dreams see you at breakfast."

"Yes," Anson said.

VIII

The older members of the firm insisted that Anson should go
abroad for the summer. He had scarcely had a vacation in seven
years, they said. He was stale and needed a change. Anson resisted.

"If I go," he declared, "I won't come back any more."

"That's absurd, old man. You'll be back in three months with all
this depression gone. Fit as ever."

"No." He shook his head stubbornly. "If I stop, I won't go back
to work. If 1 stop, that means I've given up I'm through."

"We'll take a chance on that. Stay six months if you like we're
not afraid you'll leave us. Why, you'd be miserable if you didn't
work."

They arranged his passage for him. They liked Anson every one
liked Anson and the change that had been coming over him cast
a sort of pall over the office. The enthusiasm that had invariably
signalled up business, the consideration toward his equals and his
inferiors, the lift of his vital presence within the past four months
his intense nervousness had melted down these qualities into the
fussy pessimism of a man of forty. On every transaction in which
he was involved he acted as a drag and a strain.

"If I go I'll never come back," he said.

Three days before he sailed Paula Legendre Hagerty died in
childbirth. I was with him a great deal then, for we were crossing
together, but for the first time in our friendship he told me not a
word of how he felt, nor did I see the slightest sign of emotion. His
chief preoccupation was with the fact that he was thirty years old
he would turn the conversation to the point where he could remind
you of it and then fall silent, as if he assumed that the statement
would start a chain of thought sufficient to itself. Like his partners,
I was amazed at the change in him, and I was glad when the Paris
moved off into the wet space between the worlds, leaving his princi-
pality behind.

"How about a drink?" he suggested.

We walked into the bar with that defiant feeling that characterizes
the day of departure and ordered four Martinis. After one cocktail
a change came over him he suddenly reached across and slapped
my knee with the first joviality I had seen him exhibit for months.

"Did you see that girl in the red tarn?" he demanded, "the one
with the high color who had the two police dogs down to bid
her good-by."

"She's pretty," I agreed.

"I looked her up in the purser's office and found out that she's
alone. I'm going down to see the steward in a few minutes. We'll
have dinner with her to-night."

After a while he left me, and within an hour he was walking up
and down the deck with her, talking to her in his strong, clear voice.
Her red tarn was a bright spot of color against the steel-green sea,
and from time to time she looked up with a flashing bob of her head,
and smiled with amusement and interest, and anticipation. At dinner
we had champagne, and were very joyous afterward Anson ran the
pool with infectious gusto, and several people who had seen me
with him asked me his name. He and the girl were talking and
laughing together on a lounge in the bar when I went to bed.

I saw less of him on the trip than I had hoped. He wanted to
arrange a foursome, but there was no one available, so I saw him only
at meals. Sometimes, though, he would have a cocktail in the bar,
and he told me about the girl in the red tarn, and his adventures
with her, making them all bizarre and amusing, as he had a way of
doing, and I was glad that he was himself again, or at least the self
that I knew, and with which I felt at home. I don't think he was
ever happy unless some one was in love with him, responding to
him like filings to a magnet, helping him to explain himself, promis-
ing him something. What it was I do not know. Perhaps they prom-
ised that there would always be women in the world who would
spend their brightest, freshest, rarest hours to nurse and protect
that superiority he cherished in his heart.