"I'd played a big game, you know. When my father died we hadn't much left but position--and that was going. I don't blame my father--he wasn't a business man--he should have been a literary critic--that little book of essays of his still sells, you know; not much but there's a demand for a dozen copies every year and that's a good deal for an American who's been dead for thirty. Well, that's where the children get their liking for things like that--I've got it too, a little--I could have done something there if I'd had time. But I never had time.

"I could have done it when I got out of Harvard--drifted along like half a dozen people I know, played at law, played at writing, played always and forever at being a gentleman--ended up as an officer of the Century Club with what little money I had in an annuity. But I couldn't stand the idea of just sc.r.a.ping along. And for nearly ten years I put those things aside.

"You know about my going West and the way I lived there. It wasn't easy when I'd been at Harvard and gone everywhere in New York and Boston--starting in so far below the bottom that you couldn't even see the bottom unless you squinted your eyes. But I never took a job with more money if I thought I could learn anything in a job with less--and every place I went I stayed until I could handle the job of the man two places ahead of me--and if I didn't get his job when I asked for it I went somewhere else. I don't think I read a book except a technical one for the first five years. And after that, when the chain-stores started going they asked me back to New York--a big offer too--but it wasn't the kind I wanted and I threw it down. I knew just how I wanted to come back to New York and that's the way I came.

"I don't suppose my morals were too edifying those years. But they were as good as the men I went with and I kept myself in hand. I saw men go to pieces with drink--and I didn't drink. I saw men go to pieces over women--and I kept away from that kind of woman. A man has to have women in his life no matter how much you talk about it--but I took the kind with the price-tag because when you paid them you were through. I could have married a dozen times if I'd wanted but I didn't want--that old hocus-pocus of tradition was still with me, stronger than death--I thought I knew the kind of wife I wanted and she was in the East.

"Then the partnership with Jessup came and I took it. And after a year I was made. I wasn't the last of one of the penniless old families that give each other dinners once a month and pretend they're the real society because they haven't money enough to trail in the present society game--even by then I was--what did that last newspaper story say? 'a figure of nation-wide importance.' Then it must be just about time, I thought, that this figure of nation-wide importance began to look around a little and married the wife he'd been waiting for and started to pick up all the things he hadn't had for twelve years.

"Well--Mary. And I was so careful about Mary," his lips twisted, half whimsically, half painfully. "I was so d.a.m.n sure. I was so d.a.m.n sure I knew everything about women.

"She had the qualities I'd said to myself I wanted--beauty, position, breeding, a good enough mind, some common sense. She hadn't money, but there I thought I could help her--the way she ran things for her father on what they had showed what she could do with more. We weren't in love with each other--oh dear no--but that I considered on the whole an advantage--she attracted me and it's fair enough to say that beside most of the men she'd been seeing my combination of having been Old New York and being one of the young big coming men from the West dazzled her rather. And anyhow I didn't want--pa.s.sion--exactly. I thought it would take too much time when I was only in the middle of my game and getting as much real solid fun out of it as a kid gets out of cooking his own dinner in camp. I wanted a partner and a home and children and somebody to sit at the head of my table when I wanted to be--public--and yet somebody you could be at home with when you wanted to be at home. And I thought I had them all in Mary--I thought I was being about the most sensible man in the world.

"Well, up till after both children were born I think I tried pretty hard. I gave her all I could think of--materially at least. And then I found out in spite of myself that you can't be married to a woman--even bearably--and neither be lovers nor friends with her. And Mary and I never got beyond the social acquaintance stage.

"It wasn't all Mary's fault either--I can see that now. A good deal was in the way she'd been brought up--they weren't modern about the blisses of ignorance in the nineties. But the rest of it was Mary and she couldn't have changed it any more than she could have been rude to a servant or raised her voice more than usual when she really wanted something done.

"She'd been brought up never to be demonstrative--that was one thing.

But that wasn't the main trouble--the main trouble was her most curious, most frigid self-sufficiency. Until her children came she was the most wholly self-sufficient person I've ever known. She was really only happy when she was entirely alone, always. It wasn't egotism exactly--she's always had a very-well-mannered conviction of her own relative unimportance--it was just that in spite of the fact that she seemed so perfectly healthy and calm and composed whenever she was with other people they'd be sure to hurt her a little somehow or other without meaning to--the only person she could genuinely depend on never to hurt her was herself.

"As for men, she'd formed one crystallized opinion of men in the first weeks of our marriage and she's kept it ever since. She looks at them as if they were a kind of tame wolf about the house--something you must never show you're afraid of, something you must feed and look after and be publicly amiable to because you must be just--but something you never never would bring in the house of your own accord or touch without feeling that you, that you had to preserve so jealously against all the things that could possibly hurt it, start to shrink and be pained inside.

"Then the children came--she did and does love them. She lives for them.

But they're part of herself too, you see, an essential part, and as she can't give herself to anybody but herself, she can't give them to me even in the easiest kind of partnership, really. You don't leave small children alone with even the tamest kind of wolf--and she's the kind of woman whose children are always six to her. And she's their mother--and so she has her way.

"That's the way it got worse. Right up to six years ago.

"I'd done my job--I was President of the Commercial. And I'd made my money, and the money still kept coming in as if it didn't make any difference what I did with it. I'd won my game. And what was there in it for me?

"I didn't have a home--I had a place where I ate and slept. I didn't have a wife--I had an acquaintance who kept house for me. I had children--at school and college. I didn't have real hobbies--I hadn't had time for them. And I was forty-nine. All I could do was go on making money till I died.

"Well, you changed that," his voice shook a little.

"You came and I saw and knew and took you. And I'm not sorry. Because you've made me alive again. And I'm going to be alive now till I die.

"Funny--I was never so anxious about anything happening as I have been about--our approaching mutual disappearance. Especially the last six months when I've been planning. But now that's settled.

"Mary will have more than enough and the children are grown. They won't know--I still have brains enough to settle that and money will do nearly everything. It'll be a nine days' wonder. 'Sudden Disappearance of Prominent Financier--Foul Play Suspected' and that'll be all.

"As for the Commercial--I haven't come to my age without finding out that n.o.body in the world is indispensable. If a taxi ran over me tomorrow they'd have to do without me--and Harris and the young men can handle things.

"But you know where there'll be an elderly gentleman retired from business with a country house and a garden he can putter around in all his worst clothes. And a wife that reads d.i.c.kens to him in the evening--oh yes, Rose, we'll take d.i.c.kens along. And he'll be pretty contented as things go--that retired old gentleman."

The darkness had pa.s.sed from his eyes--he was smiling now.

"Be nice--eh Rose?"

He took her hand--the warm touch was still strong, still rea.s.suring.

Only the eyes that he was not looking at now seemed singularly unsure, as if they had seen something they had pondered over lightly, as a mere possibility, years ago, take on sudden impatient body and demand to be heard.

She let her hand lie lightly in his for a moment. Then she rose.

"Half past twelve" she said a little stiffly. "Time for two such genuine antiques as we are to think of being put away in our cases for the night."

XXII

It was three in the afternoon before Oliver walked into the Hotel Rosario again and when he did it was with the feeling that the house detective might come up at any moment, touch him quietly on the shoulder and remark that his bag _might_ be sent down to the station after him if he paid his bill and left quietly and at once. An appearance before a hoa.r.s.e judge who fined him ten dollars in as many seconds had not helped his self-confidence though he kept wondering if there was a sliding scale of penalties for improper language applied to the police of St.

Louis and just what would have happened if he had called the large blue policeman anything out of his A.E.F. vocabulary. Also the desk, when he called there for his key, reminded him twingingly of the dock, and the clerk behind it looked at him so knowingly as he made the request that Oliver began to construct a hasty moral defence of his whole life from the time he had stolen sugar at eight, when he was rea.s.sured by the clerk's merely saying in a voice like a wink. "Telephone call for you last night, Mr. Crowe."

_Nancy!_

With a horrible effort to keep impa.s.sive, "Yes? Who was it?"

"Party didn't leave a name."

"Oh. When?"

"'Bout 'leven o'clock."

"And she didn't leave any message?" Then Oliver turned pink at having betrayed himself so easily.

"No-o--_she_ didn't." The clerk's eyelid drooped a trifle. Those collegy looking boys were certainly h.e.l.l with women.

"Oh, well--" with a vast attempt to seem careless. "Thanks. Where's the 'phone?"

"Over there" and Oliver followed the direction of the jerked thumb to shut himself up in a booth with his heart, apparently, bent upon doing queer interpretative dances and his mind full of all the most apologetic words in or out of the dictionary. "h.e.l.lo. h.e.l.lo. _Is this Nancy_?"

"This is Mrs. S. R. Ellicott." The voice seems extremely detached.

"Oh, good morning, Mrs. Ellicott. This is Oliver--Oliver Crowe, you know. Is Nancy there?"

Nor does it appear inclined toward lengthy conversation--the voice at the other end. "No."

"Well, when will she be in? I've got to take the five o'clock train Mrs.

Ellicott--I've simply got to--I may lose my job if I don't--but I've got to talk to her first--I've got to explain--"

"There can be very little good, I think, in your talking to her Mr.

Crowe. She has told me that you both consider the engagement at an end."

"But that's impossible, Mrs. Ellicott--that's too absurd" Oliver felt too much as if he were fighting for life against something invisible to be careful about his words. "I know we quarrelled last night--but it was all my fault, I didn't mean anything--I was going to call her up the first thing this morning but you see, they wouldn't let me out--"

Then he stopped with a grim realization of just what it was that he had said. There was a long fateful pause from the other end of the wire.

"I'm afraid I don't quite understand, Mr. Crowe."

"They wouldn't let me out. I was--er--detained--ah--kept in."