“No, thanks. I mean, yes, I am eating.” He looked cautiously at his plate. “The girl is very nice. There isn’t a girl in town with better manners or more stuff. If things were like they were before the war, I’d say—”
He couldn’t think exactly what it was he would have said; all he knew was that he was now on an entirely different road from his parents’.
“This city was scarcely more than a village before the war,” said old Mrs. Forrest.
“Forrest means the World War, granny,” said Eleanor.
“Some things don’t change,” said Pierce Winslow. Both he and Forrest thought of the Kennemore Club matter and, feeling guilty, the older man lost his temper:
“When people start going to parties given by a convicted criminal, there’s something serious the matter with them.”
“We won’t discuss it any more at table,” said Mrs. Winslow hastily.
About four, Forrest called a number on the telephone in his room. He had known for some time that he was going to call a number.
“Is Miss Rikker at home? … Oh, hello. This is Forrest Winslow.”
“How are you?”
“Terrible. It was a good party.”
“Wasn’t it?”
“Too good. What are you doing?”
“Entertaining two awful hangovers.”
“Will you entertain me too?”
“I certainly will. Come on over.”
The two young men could only groan and play sentimental music on the phonograph, but presently they departed; the fire leaped up, day went out behind the windows, and Forrest had rum in his tea.
“So we met at last,” he said.
“The delay was all yours.”
“Damn prejudice,” he said. “This is a conservative city, and your father being in this trouble—”
“I can’t discuss my father with you.”
“Excuse me. I only wanted to say that I’ve felt like a fool lately for not knowing you. For cheating myself out of the pleasure of knowing you for a silly prejudice,” he blundered on. “So I decided to follow my own instincts.”
She stood up suddenly. “Good-by, Mr. Winslow.”
“What? Why?”
“Because it’s absurd for you to come here as if you were doing me a favor. And after accepting our hospitality, to remind me of my father’s troubles is simply bad manners.”
He was on his feet, terribly upset. “That isn’t what I meant. I said I had felt that way, and I despised myself for it. Please don’t be sore.”
“Then don’t be condescending.” She sat back in her chair. Her mother came in, stayed only a moment, and threw Forrest a glance of resentment and suspicion as she left. But her passage through had brought them together, and they talked frankly for a long time.
“I ought to be upstairs dressing.”
“I ought to have gone an hour ago, and I can’t.”
“Neither can I.”
With the admission they had traveled far. At the door he kissed her unreluctant lips and walked home, throwing futile buckets of reason on the wild fire.
Less than two weeks later it happened. In a car parked in a blizzard he poured out his worship, and she lay on his chest, sighing, “Oh, me too—me too.”
Already Forrest’s family knew where he went in the evenings; there was a frightened coolness, and one morning his mother said:
“Son, you don’t want to throw yourself away on some girl that isn’t up to you. I thought you were interested in Jane Drake.”
“Don’t bring that up. I’m not going to talk about it.”
But it was only a postponement. Meanwhile the days of this February were white and magical, the nights were starry and crystalline. The town lay under a cold glory; the smell of her furs was incense, her bright cheeks were flames upon a northern altar. An ecstatic pantheism for his land and its weather welled up in him. She had brought him finally back to it; he would live here always.
“I want you so much that nothing can stand in the way of that,” he said to Alida. “But I owe my parents a debt that I can’t explain to you. They did more than spend money on me; they tried to give me something more intangible—something that their parents had given them and that they thought was worth handing on. Evidently it didn’t take with me, but I’ve got to make this as easy as possible for them.” He saw by her face that he had hurt her. “Darling—”
“Oh, it frightens me when you talk like that,” she said. “Are you going to reproach me later? It would be awful. You’ll have to get it out of your head that you’re doing anything wrong. My standards are as high as yours, and I can’t start out with my father’s sins on my shoulders.” She thought for a moment. “You’ll never be able to reconcile it all like a children’s story. You’ve got to choose. Probably you’ll have to hurt either your family or hurt me.”
A fortnight later the storm broke at the Winslow house. Pierce Winslow came home in a quiet rage and had a session behind closed doors with his wife. Afterward she knocked at Forrest’s door.
“Your father had a very embarrassing experience today. Chauncey Rikker came up to him in the Downtown Club and began talking about you as if you were on terms of some understanding with his daughter. Your father walked away, but we’ve got to know. Are you serious about Miss Rikker?”
“I want to marry her,” he said.
“Oh, Forrest!”
She talked for a long time, recapitulating, as if it were a matter of centuries, the eighty years that his family had been identified with the city; when she passed from this to the story of his father’s health, Forrest interrupted:
“That’s all so irrelevant, mother. If there was anything against Alida personally, what you say would have some weight, but there isn’t.”
“She’s overdressed; she runs around with everybody—”
“She isn’t a bit different from Eleanor. She’s absolutely a lady in every sense. I feel like a fool even discussing her like this. You’re just afraid it’ll connect you in some way with the Rikkers.”
“I’m not afraid of that,” said his mother, annoyed. “Nothing would ever do that. But I’m afraid that it’ll separate you from everything worth while, everybody that loves you. It isn’t fair for you to upset our lives, let us in for disgraceful gossip—”
“I’m to give up the girl I love because you’re afraid of a little gossip.”
The controversy was resumed next day, with Pierce Winslow debating. His argument was that he was born in old Kentucky, that he had always felt uneasy at having begotten a son upon a pioneer Minnesota family, and that this was what he might have expected. Forrest felt that his parents’ attitude was trivial and disingenuous. Only when he was out of the house, acting against their wishes, did he feel any compunction. But always he felt that something precious was being frayed away—his youthful companionship with his father and his love and trust for his mother. Hour by hour he saw the past being irreparably spoiled, and save when he was with Alida, he was deeply unhappy.
One spring day when the situation had become unendurable, with half the family meals taken in silence, Forrest’s great-grandmother stopped him on the stair landing and put her hand on his arm.
“Has this girl really a good character?” she asked, her fine, clear, old eyes resting on his.
“Of course she has, gramma.”
“Then marry her.”
“Why do you say that?” Forrest asked curiously.
“It would stop all this nonsense and we could have some peace. And I’ve been thinking I’d like to be a great-great-grandmother before I die.”
Her frank selfishness appealed to him more than the righteousness of the others. That night he and Alida decided to be married the first of June, and telephoned the announcement to the papers.
Now the storm broke in earnest. Crest Avenue rang with gossip—how Mrs. Rikker had called on Mrs. Winslow, who was not at home. How Forrest had gone to live in the University Club. How Chauncey Rikker and Pierce Winslow had had words in the Downtown Club.
It was true that Forrest had gone to the University Club. On a May night, with summer sounds already gathered on the window screens, he packed his trunk and his suitcases in the room where he had lived as a boy. His throat contracted and he smeared his face with his dusty hand as he took a row of golf cups off the mantelpiece, and he choked to himself: “If they won’t take Alida, then they’re not my family any more.”
As he finished packing, his mother came in.
“You’re not really leaving.” Her voice was stricken.
“I’m moving to the University Club.”
“That’s so unnecessary. No one bothers you here. You do what you want.”
“I can’t bring Alida here.”
“Father—”
“Hell with father!” he said wildly.
She sat down on the bed beside him. “Stay here, Forrest. I promise not to argue with you any more. But stay here.”
“I can’t.”
“I can’t have you go!” she wailed. “It seems as if we’re driving you out, and we’re not!”
“You mean it looks as though you were driving me out.”
“I don’t mean that.”
“Yes, you do. And I want to say that I don’t think you and father really care a hang about Chauncey Rikker’s moral character.”
“That’s not true, Forrest. I hate people that behave badly and break the laws. My own father would never have let Chauncey Rikker—”
“I’m not talking about your father. But neither you nor my father care a bit what Chauncey Rikker did. I bet you don’t even know what it was.”
“Of course I know. He stole some money and went abroad, and when he came back they put him in prison.”
“They put him in prison for contempt
