LITMIR.BIZ

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to him. He leaned against a pillar and gloated. He felt gorgeously unselfish. . . . That various girl wallflowers were sitting near him, waiting to be asked, did not occur to him either.

      He saw Fatty introduce Leora to a decorative pair of Digams, one of whom begged her for the next. Thereafter she had more invitations than she could take. Martin’s excitement cooled. It seemed to him that she clung too closely to her partners, that she followed their steps too eagerly. After the fifth dance he was agitated. “Course! she’s enjoying herself! Hasn’t got time to notice that I just stand here—yes, by thunder, and hold her scarf! Sure! Fine for her. Fact I might like a little dancing myself—And the way she grins and gawps at that fool Brindle Morgan, the—the—the damnedest—Oh, you and I are going to have a talk, young woman! And those hounds trying to pinch her off me—the one thing I’ve ever loved! Just because they dance better than I can, and spiel a lot of foolishness—And that damn’ orchestra playing that damn’ peppery music—And she falling for all their damn’ cheap compliments and—You and I are going to have one lovely little understanding!”

      When she next returned to him, besieged by three capering medics, he muttered to her, “Oh, it doesn’t matter about me!”

      “Would you like this one? Course you shall have it!” She turned to him fully; she had none of Madeline’s sense of having to act for the benefit of observers. Through a strained eternity of waiting, while he glowered, she babbled of the floor, the size of the room, and her “dandy partners.” At the sound of the music he held out his arms.

      “No,” she said. “I want to talk to you.” She led him to a corner and hurled at him, “Sandy, this is the last time I’m going to stand for your looking jealous. Oh, I know! See here! If we’re going to stick together—and we are!—I’m going to dance with just as many men as I want to, and I’m going to be just as foolish with ’em as I want to. Dinners and those things—I suppose I’ll always go on being a clam. Nothing to say. But I love dancing, and I’m going to do exactly what I want to, and if you had any sense whatever, you’d know I don’t care a hang for anybody but you. Yours! Absolute. No matter what fool things you do—and they’ll probably be a plenty. So when you go and get jealous on me again, you sneak off and get rid of it. Aren’t you ashamed of yourself!”

      “I wasn’t jealous—Yes, I was. Oh, I can’t help it! I love you so much. I’d be one fine lover, now wouldn’t I, if I never got jealous!”

      “All right. Only you’ve got to keep it under cover. Now we’ll finish the dance.”

      He was her slave.

      IV

      It was regarded as immoral, at the University of Winnemac, to dance after midnight, and at that hour the guests crowded into the Imperial Cafeteria. Ordinarily it closed at eight, but tonight it kept open till one, and developed a spirit of almost lascivious mirth. Fatty Pfaff did a jig, another humorous student, with a napkin over his arm, pretended to be a waiter, and a girl (but she was much disapproved) smoked a cigarette.

      At the door Clif Clawson was waiting for Martin and Leora. He was in his familiar shiny gray suit, with a blue flannel shirt.

      Clif assumed that he was the authority to whom all of Martin’s friends must be brought for judgment. He had not met Leora. Martin had confessed his double engagement; he had explained that Leora was unquestionably the most gracious young woman on earth; but as he had previously used up all of his laudatory adjectives and all of Clif’s patience on the subject of Madeline, Clif failed to listen, and prepared to dislike Leora as another siren of morality.

      He eyed her now with patronizing enmity. He croaked at Martin behind her back, “Good-looking kid, I will say that for her—what’s wrong with her?” When they had brought their own sandwiches and coffee and mosaic cake from the long counter, Clif rasped:

      “Well, it’s grand of a couple of dress-suit swells like you to assassinate with me ’mid the midmosts of sartorials and Sassiety. Gosh, it’s fierce I had to miss the select pleasures of an evening with Anxious Duer and associated highboys, and merely play a low game of poker—in which Father deftly removed the sum of six simolea, point ten, from the fore-gathered bums and yahoos. Well, Leory, I suppose you and Martykins here have now ratiocinated all these questions of polo and, uh, Monte Carlo and so on.”

      She had an immense power of accepting people as they were. While Clif waited, leering, she placidly investigated the inside of a chicken sandwich and assented, “Um-huh.”

      “Good boy! I thought you were going to pull that ‘If you are a roughneck, I don’t see why you think you’ve got to boast about it’ stuff that Mart springs on me!”

      Clif turned into a jovial and (for him) unusually quiet companion. . . . Ex-farmhand, ex-book-agent, ex-mechanic, he had so little money yet so scratching a desire to be resplendent that he took refuge in pride in poverty, pride in being offensive. Now, when Leora seemed to look through his boasting, he liked her as quickly as had Martin, and they buzzed with gaiety. Martin was warmed to benevolence toward mankind, including Angus Duer, who was at the end of the room at a table with Dean Silva and his silvery women. Without plan, Martin sprang up, raced down the room. Holding out his hand he clamored:

      “Angus, old man, want to congratulate you on getting Sigma Xi. That’s fine.”

      Duer regarded the outstretched hand as though it was an instrument which he had seen before but whose use he could not quite remember. He picked it up and shook it tentatively. He did not turn his back; he was worse than rude—he looked patient.

      “Well, good luck,” said Martin, chilled and shaky.

      “Very good of you. Thanks.”

      Martin returned to Leora and Clif, to tell them the incident as a cosmic tragedy. They agreed that Angus Duer was to be shot. In the midst of it Duer came past, trailing after Dean Silva’s party, and nodded to Martin, who glared back, feeling noble and mature.

      At parting, Clif held Leora’s hand and urged, “Honey, I think a lot of Mart, and one time I was afraid the old kid was going to get tied up to—to parties that would turn him into a hand-shaker. I’m a hand-shaker myself. I know less about medicine than Prof Robertshaw. But this boob has some conscience to him, and I’m so darn’ glad he’s playing around with a girl that’s real folks and—Oh, listen at me fallin’ all over my clumsy feet! But I just mean I hope you won’t mind Uncle Clif saying he does by golly like you a lot!”

      It was almost four when Martin returned from taking Leora home and sagged into bed. He could not sleep. The aloofness of Angus Duer racked him as an insult to himself, as somehow an implied insult to Leora, but his boyish rage had passed into a bleaker worry. Didn’t Duer, for all his snobbishness and shallowness, have something that he himself lacked? Didn’t Clif, with his puppy-dog humor, his speech of a vaudeville farmer, his suspicion of fine manners as posing, take life too easily? Didn’t Duer know how to control and drive his hard little mind? Wasn’t there a technique of manners as there was of experimentation. . . . Gottlieb’s fluent bench-technique versus the clumsy and podgy hands of Ira Hinkley. . . . Or was all this inquiry a treachery, a yielding to Duer’s own affected standard?

      He was so tired that behind his closed eyelids were flashes of fire. His whirling mind flew over every sentence he had said or heard that night, till round his twisting body there was fevered shouting.

      V

      As he grumped across the medical campus next day, he came unexpectedly upon Angus and he was smitten with the guiltiness and embarrassment one has toward a person who has borrowed money and probably will not return it. Mechanically he began to blurt “Hello,” but he checked it in a croak, scowled, and stumbled on.

      “Oh, Mart,” Angus called. He was dismayingly even. “Remember speaking to me last evening? It struck me when I was going out that you looked huffy. I was wondering if you thought I’d been rude. I’m sorry if you did. Fact is, I had a rotten headache. Look. I’ve got four tickets for ‘As It Listeth,’ in Zenith, next Friday evening—original New York cast! Like to see it? And I noticed

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