"Are you _never_ going to get over that, you a.s.s?"

"You didn't do the things I did," from Ted, rather difficultly. "If you had--"

"If I had I'd have been as sorry as you are, probably, that I'd knocked over the apple cart occasionally. But I wouldn't spend the rest of my life worrying about it and thinking I wasn't fit to go into decent society because of what happened to most of the A.E.F. Why you sound as if you'd committed the unpardonable sin. And it's nonsense."

"Well--thinking of Elinor--I'm not too darn sure I didn't," from Ted, dejectedly.

"That comes of being born in New England and that's all there is to it.

Anyhow, it's over now, isn't it?"

"Not exactly--it comes back."

"Well, kick it every time it does."

"But you don't understand. That and--people like Elinor--" says Ted hopelessly.

"I do understand."

"You don't." And this time Ted's face has the look of a burned man.

"Well--" says Oliver, frankly puzzled. "Well, that's it. Oh, it doesn't matter. But if there was another war--"

"Oh, leave us poor people that are trying to write a couple of years before you dump us into heroes' graves by the Yang tse Kiang!"

"Another war--and bang! into the aviation." Ted muses, his face gone thin with tensity. "It could last as long as it liked for me, providing I got through before it did; you'd be living anyhow, living and somebody, and somebody who didn't give a plaintive hoot how things broke."

He sighs, and his face smooths back a little.

"Well, Lord, I've no real reason to kick, I suppose," he ends. "There are dozens of 'em like me--dozens and hundreds and thousands all over the shop. We had danger and all the physical pleasures and as much money as we wanted and the sense of command--all through the war. And then they come along and say 'it's all off, girls,' and you go back and settle down and play you've just come out of College in peace-times and maybe by the time you're forty you'll have a wife and an income if another sc.r.a.p doesn't come along. And then when we find it isn't as easy to readjust as they think, they yammer around pop-eyed and say 'Oh, what wild young people--what naughty little wasters! They won't settle down and play Puss-in-the-corner at all--and, oh dear, oh dear, how they drink and smoke and curse 'n everything!'"

"I'm awful afraid they might be right as to what's the trouble with us, though," says Oliver, didactically. "We _are_ young, you know."

"Melgrove!" the conductor howls, sleepily. "Melgrove! Melgrove!"

V

The Crowe house was both small and inconveniently situated--it was twenty full minutes walk from the station and though a little box of a garage had been one of the "all modern conveniences" so fervidly painted in the real estate agent's advertis.e.m.e.nt, the Crowes had no car. It was the last house on Undercliff Road that had any pretense to spa.r.s.e gra.s.s and a stubbly hedge--beyond it were sand-dunes, delusively ornamented by the signs of streets that as yet only existed in the brain of the owner of the "development," and, a quarter of a mile away, the long blue streak of the Sound.

Oliver's key clicked in the lock--this was fortunately one of the times when four-year-old Jane Ellen, who went about after sunset in a continual, piteous fear of "black men wif masks," had omitted to put the chain on the door before being carried mutinously to bed. Oliver switched on the hall light and picked up a letter and a folded note from the card tray.

"Ted, Ollie and d.i.c.kie will share that little bijou, the sleeping porch, unless Ted prefers the third-story bathtub," the note read. "Breakfast at convenience for those that can get it themselves--otherwise at nine.

And DON'T wake d.i.c.kie up.

"MOTHER."

Oliver pa.s.sed it to Ted, who read it, grinned, and saluted, nearly knocking over the hatrack.

"For _G.o.d's_ sake!" said Oliver in a piercing whisper, "Jane Ellen will think that's Indians!"

Both listened frantically for a moment, holding their breath. But there was no sound from upstairs except an occasional soft rumbling. Oliver had often wondered what would happen if the whole sleeping family chanced to breathe in and out in unison some unlucky night. He could see the papery walls blown apart like sc.r.a.ps of cardboard--Aunt Elsie falling, falling with her bed from her little bird-house under the eaves, giving vent to one deaf, terrified "Hey--what's that?" as she sank like Lucifer cast from Heaven inexorably down into the laundry stove, her little tight, white curls standing up on end....

Ted had removed his shoes and was making for the stairs with the exaggerated caution of a burglar in a film.

"'Night!" called Oliver softly.

"G' night! Where's my bed--next the wall? Good--then I won't step on d.i.c.kie. And if you fall over me when you come in, I'll bay like a bloodhound!"

"I'll look out. Be up in a minute myself. Going to write a letter."

"So I'd already deduced, Craig Kennedy, my friend. Well, give her my love!"

He smiled like a bad little boy and disappeared round the corner. A stair creaked--they were the kind of stairs that always creaked like old women's bones, when you tried to go up them quietly. There was the sound of something soft stubbing against something hard and a m.u.f.fled "_Sonofa--_"

"What's matter?"

"Oh, nothing. Blame near broke my toe on Jane Ellen's doll's porcelain head. 'S all right. 'Night."

"'Night." Then in an admonitory sotto-voce, "Remember, if you wake d.i.c.kie, you've got to tell him stories till he goes to sleep again, or he'll wake up everybody else!"

"If he wakes, I'll garotte him. 'Night."

"'Night."

VI

Oliver paused for a few minutes, waiting for the crash that would proclaim that Ted had stumbled over something and waked d.i.c.kie beyond redemption. But there was nothing but a soft gurgling of water from the bathroom and then, after a while, a slight but definite addition to the distant beehive noises of sleep in the house. He smiled, moved cautiously into the dining room, sat down at the small sharp-cornered desk where all the family correspondence was carried on and from which at least one of the family a day received a grievous blow in the side while attempting to get around it; lit the shaded light above it and sat down to read his letter.

It was all Nancy, that letter, from the address, firm and straight as any promise she ever gave, but graceful as the curl of a vine-stem, gracile as her hands, with little unsuspected curlicues of humor and fancy making the stiff "t's" bend and twisting the tails of the "e's,"

to the little scrunched-up "Love, Nancy" at the end, as if she had squeezed it there to make it look unimportant, knowing perfectly that it was the one really important thing in the letter to him. Both would take it so and be thankful without greediness or a longing for sentimental "x's," with a sense that the thing so given must be very rich in little like a jewel, and always newly rediscovered with a shiver of pure wonder and thanking, or neither could have borne to have it written so small.

It was Nancy just as some of her clothes were Nancy, soft clear blues and first appleblossom pinks, the colors of a hardy garden that has no need for the phoenix-colors of the poppy, because it has pa.s.sed the boy's necessity for talking at the top of its voice in scarlet and can hold in one shaped fastidious petal, faint-flushed with a single trembling of one serene living dye, all the colors the wise mind knows and the soul released into its ecstasy has taken for its body invisible, its body of delight most spotless, as lightning takes bright body of rapture and agony from the light clear pallor that softens a sky to night.

Oliver read the letter over twice--it was with a satisfaction like that when body and brain are fed at once, invisibly, by the same l.u.s.tre of force, that he put it away. One part of it, though, left him humanly troubled enough.

"Miss Winters, the old incubus, came around and was soppy to mother as usual yesterday--the same old business--I might be studying in Paris, now, instead of teaching drawing to stupid little girls, if I hadn't 'formed' what she will call 'that unfortunate attachment.' Not that I minded, really, though I was angry enough to bite her when she gave a long undertaker's list of Penniless Authors' Brides. But it worries mother--and that worries me--and I wish she wouldn't. Forgive me, Ollie--and then that Richardson complex of mother's came up again--"

"Waiting hurts, naturally,--and I'm the person who used to wonder about girls making such a fuss about how soon they got married--but, then, Ollie, of course, I never really wanted to get married before myself and somehow that seems to make a difference. But that's the way things go--and the only thing I wish is that I was the only person to be hurt.

We will, sooner or later, and it will be all the better for our not having grabbed at once--at least that's what all the old people with no emotions left are always so anxious to tell you. But they talk about it as if anybody under thirty-five who wanted to get married was acting like a three-year-old stealing jam--and that's annoying. And anyhow, it wouldn't be bad, if I weren't so silly, I suppose--"

"Waiting hurts, naturally," and that casual sentence made him chilly afraid. For to be in love, though it may force the lover to actions of impossible courage does not make him in the least courageous of himself, but only drives him by the one large fear of losing this love like a soldier p.r.i.c.ked from behind by a bayonet over the bodies of smaller fears, or like a thief who has stolen treasure, and, hearing the cry at his heels, scales a twenty foot wall with the agile gestures of a madman. All the old-wives' and young men's club stories of everything from broken engagements to the Generic and Proven Unfaithfulness of the Female s.e.x brushed like dirty cobwebs for an instant across his mind.