LITMIR.BIZ

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She's lucky! Oh well, she probably calms me down and keeps me from becoming a complete neurote! Probably that's why I'm so darned everlastingly fond of her. And yet I'm chump enough to wish you and I were together—uh—recognizedly together, all the time—and could fight together to keep some little light burning in this coming new glacial epoch. I do. All the time. I think that, at this moment, all things considered, I should like to kiss you."

      "Is that so unusual a celebration?"

      "Yes. Always. Always it's the first time again! Look, Linda, do you ever stop to think how curious it is, that with—everything between us—like that night in the hotel at Montreal—we neither one of us seem to feel any guilt, any embarrassment—can sit and gossip like this?"

      "No, dear. . . . Darling! . . . It doesn't seem a bit curious. It was all so natural. So good!"

      "And yet we're reasonably responsible people—"

      "Of course. That's why nobody suspects us, not even Emma. Thank God she doesn't, Doremus! I wouldn't hurt her for anything, not even for your kind-hearted favors!"

      "Beast!"

      "Oh, you might be suspected, all by yourself. It's known that you sometimes drink likker and play poker and tell 'hot ones.' But who'd ever suspect that the local female crank, the suffragist, the pacifist, the anti-censorshipist, the friend of Jane Addams and Mother Bloor, could be a libertine! Highbrows! Bloodless reformers! Oh, and I've known so many women agitators, all dressed in Carrie Nation hatchets and modest sheets of statistics, that have been ten times as passionate, intolerably passionate, as any cream-faced plump little Kept Wife in chiffon step-ins!"

      For a moment their embracing eyes were not merely friendly and accustomed and careless.

      He fretted, "Oh I think of you all the time and want you and yet I think of Emma too—and I don't even have the fine novelistic egotism of feeling guilty and intolerably caught in complexities. Yes, it does all seem so natural, Dear Linda!"

      He stalked restlessly to the casement window, looking back at her every second step. It was dusk now, and the roads smoking. He stared out inattentively—then very attentively indeed.

      "That's curious. Curiouser and curiouser. Standing back behind that big bush, lilac bush I guess it is, across the road, there's a fellow watching this place. I can see him in the headlights whenever a car comes along. And I think it's my hired man, Oscar Ledue—Shad." He started to draw the cheerful red-and-white curtains.

      "No! No! Don't draw them! He'll get suspicious."

      "That's right. Funny, his watching there—if it is him. He's supposed to be at my house right now, looking after the furnace—winters, he only works for me couple of hours a day, works in the sash factory, rest of the time, but he ought to—A little light blackmail, I suppose. Well, he can publish everything he saw today, wherever he wants to!"

      "Only what he saw today?"

      "Anything! Any day! I'm awfully proud—old dish rag like me, twenty years older than you!—to be your lover!"

      And he was proud, yet all the while he was remembering the warning in red chalk that he had found on his front porch after the election. Before he had time to become very complicated about it, the door vociferously banged open, and his daughter, Sissy, sailed in.

      "Wot-oh, wot-oh, wot-oh! Toodle-oo! Good-morning, Jeeves! Mawnin', Miss Lindy. How's all de folks on de ole plantation everywhere I roam? Hello, Dad. No, it isn't cocktails—least, just one very small cocktail—it's youthful spirits! My God, but it's cold! Tea, Linda, my good woman—tea!"

      They had tea. A thoroughly domestic circle.

      "Race you home, Dad," said Sissy, when they were ready to go.

      "Yes—no—wait a second! Lorinda: lend me a flashlight."

      As he marched out of the door, marched belligerently across the road, in Doremus seethed all the agitated anger he had been concealing from Sissy. And part hidden behind bushes, leaning on his motorcycle, he did find Shad Ledue.

      Shad was startled; for once he looked less contemptuously masterful than a Fifth Avenue traffic policeman, as Doremus snapped, "What you doing there?" and he stumbled in answering: "Oh I just—something happened to my motor-bike."

      "So! You ought to be home tending the furnace, Shad."

      "Well, I guess I got my machine fixed now. I'll hike along."

      "No. My daughter is to drive me home, so you can put your motorcycle in the back of my car and drive it back." (Somehow, he had to talk privately to Sissy, though he was not in the least certain what it was he had to say.)

      "Her? Rats! Sissy can't drive for sour apples! Crazy's a loon!"

      "Ledue! Miss Sissy is a highly competent driver. At least she satisfies me, and if you really feel she doesn't quite satisfy your standard—"

      "Her driving don't make a damn bit of difference to me one way or th' other! G'-night!"

      Recrossing the road, Doremus rebuked himself, "That was childish of me. Trying to talk to him like a gent! But how I would enjoy murdering him!"

      He informed Sissy, at the door, "Shad happened to come along—motorcycle in bad shape—let him take my Chrysler—I'll drive with you."

      "Fine! Only six boys have had their hair turn gray, driving with me, this week."

      "And I—I meant to say, I think I'd better do the driving. It's pretty slippery tonight."

      "Wouldn't that destroy you! Why, my dear idiot parent, I'm the best driver in—"

      "You can't drive for sour apples! Crazy, that's all! Get in! I'm driving, d'you hear? Night, Lorinda."

      "All right, dearest Father," said Sissy with an impishness which reduced his knees to feebleness.

      He assured himself, though, that this flip manner of Sissy, characteristic of even the provincial boys and girls who had been nursed on gasoline, was only an imitation of the nicer New York harlots and would not last more than another year or two. Perhaps this rattle-tongued generation needed a Buzz Windrip Revolution and all its pain.

      "Beautiful, I know it's swell to drive carefully, but do you have to emulate the prudent snail?" said Sissy.

      "Snails don't skid."

      "No, they get run over. Rather skid!"

      "So your father's a fossil!"

      "Oh, I wouldn't—"

      "Well, maybe he is, at that. There's advantages. Anyway: I wonder if there isn't a lot of bunk about Age being so cautious and conservative, and Youth always being so adventurous and bold and original? Look at the young Nazis and how they enjoy beating up the Communists. Look at almost any college class—the students disapproving of the instructor because he's iconoclastic and ridicules the sacred home-town ideas. Just this afternoon, I was thinking, driving out here—"

      "Listen, Dad, do you go to Lindy's often?"

      "Why—why, not especially. Why?"

      "Why don't you—What are you two so scared of? You two wild-haired reformers—you and Lindy belong together. Why don't you—you know—kind of be lovers?"

      "Good God Almighty! Cecilia! I've never heard a decent girl talk that way in all my life!"

      "Tst! Tst! Haven't you? Dear, dear! So sorry!"

      "Well, my Lord—At least you've got to admit that it's slightly unusual for an apparently loyal daughter to suggest her father's deceiving her mother! Especially a fine lovely mother like yours!"

      "Is it? Well, maybe. Unusual to suggest it—aloud. But I wonder if lots of young females don't sometimes kind of think it, just the same, when they see the Venerable Parent going stale!"

      "Sissy—"

      "Hey, watch that telephone pole!"

      "Hang

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