He was not jealous—she meant nothing to him—but at her pathetic ruse everything stubborn and self-indulgent in him came to the surface. It was a presumption from a mental inferior and it could not be overlooked. If she wanted to know to whom she belonged she would see.
He was on the door-step at quarter past five. Dolly was dressed for the street, and he listened in silence to the paragraph of «I can only see you for an hour,» which she had begun on the phone.
«Put on your hat, Dolly,» he said, «we’ll take a walk.»
They strolled up Madison Avenue and over to Fifth while Anson’s shirt dampened upon his portly body in the deep heat. He talked little, scolding her, making no love to her, but before they had walked six blocks she was his again, apologizing for the note, offering not to see Perry at all as an atonement, offering anything. She thought that he had come because he was beginning to love her.
«I’m hot,» he said when they reached 71st Street. «This is a winter suit. If I stop by the house and change, would you mind waiting for me down-stairs? I’ll only be a minute.»
She was happy; the intimacy of his being hot, of any physical fact about him, thrilled her. When they came to the iron-grated door and Anson took out his key she experienced a sort of delight.
Down-stairs it was dark, and after he ascended in the lift Dolly raised a curtain and looked out through opaque lace at the houses over the way. She heard the lift machinery stop, and with the notion of teasing him pressed the button that brought it down. Then on what was more than an impulse she got into it and sent it up to what she guessed was his floor.
«Anson,» she called, laughing a little.
«Just a minute,» he answered from his bedroom … then after a brief delay: «Now you can come in.»
He had changed and was buttoning his vest. «This is my room,» he said lightly. «How do you like it?»
She caught sight of Paula’s picture on the wall and stared at it in fascination, just as Paula had stared at the pictures of Anson’s childish sweethearts five years before. She knew something about Paula—sometimes she tortured herself with fragments of the story.
Suddenly she came close to Anson, raising her arms. They embraced. Outside the area window a soft artificial twilight already hovered, though the sun was still bright on a back roof across the way. In half an hour the room would be quite dark. The uncalculated opportunity overwhelmed them, made them both breathless, and they clung more closely. It was eminent, inevitable. Still holding one another, they raised their heads—their eyes fell together upon Paula’s picture, staring down at them from the wall.
Suddenly Anson dropped his arms, and sitting down at his desk tried the drawer with a bunch of keys.
«Like a drink?» he asked in a gruff voice.
«No, Anson.»
He poured himself half a tumbler of whiskey, swallowed it, and then opened the door into the hall.
«Come on,» he said.
Dolly hesitated.
«Anson—I’m going to the country with you to-night, after all. You understand that, don’t you?»
«Of course,» he answered brusquely.
In Dolly’s car they rode on to Long Island, closer in their emotions than they had ever been before. They knew what would happen—not with Paula’s face to remind them that something was lacking, but when they were alone in the still, hot Long Island night they did not care.
The estate in Port Washington where they were to spend the week-end belonged to a cousin of Anson’s who had married a Montana copper operator. An interminable drive began at the lodge and twisted under imported poplar saplings toward a huge, pink, Spanish house. Anson had often visited there before.
After dinner they danced at the Linx Club. About midnight Anson assured himself that his cousins would not leave before two—then he explained that Dolly was tired; he would take her home and return to the dance later. Trembling a little with excitement, they got into a borrowed car together and drove to Port Washington. As they reached the lodge he stopped and spoke to the night-watchman.
«When are you making a round, Carl?»
«Right away.»
«Then you’ll be here till everybody’s in?»
«Yes, sir.»
«All right. Listen: if any automobile, no matter whose it is, turns in at this gate, I want you to phone the house immediately.» He put a five-dollar bill into Carl’s hand. «Is that clear?»
«Yes, Mr. Anson.» Being of the Old World, he neither winked nor smiled. Yet Dolly sat with her face turned slightly away.
Anson had a key. Once inside he poured a drink for both of them—Dolly left hers untouched—then he ascertained definitely the location of the phone, and found that it was within easy hearing distance of their rooms, both of which were on the first floor.
Five minutes later he knocked at the door of Dolly’s room.
«Anson?» He went in, closing the door behind him. She was in bed, leaning up anxiously with elbows on the pillow; sitting beside her he took her in his arms.
«Anson, darling.»
He didn’t answer.
«Anson…. Anson! I love you…. Say you love me. Say it now—can’t you say it now? Even if you don’t mean it?»
He did not listen. Over her head he perceived that the picture of Paula was hanging here upon this wall.
He got up and went close to it. The frame gleamed faintly with thrice-reflected moonlight—within was a blurred shadow of a face that he saw he did not know. Almost sobbing, he turned around and stared with abomination at the little figure on the bed.
«This is all foolishness,» he said thickly. «I don’t know what I was thinking about. I don’t love you and you’d better wait for somebody that loves you. I don’t love you a bit, can’t you understand?»
His voice broke, and he went hurriedly out. Back in the salon he was pouring himself a drink with uneasy fingers, when the front door opened suddenly, and his cousin came in.
«Why, Anson, I hear Dolly’s sick,» she began solicitously. «I hear she’s sick….»
«It was nothing,» he interrupted, raising his voice so that it would carry into Dolly’s room. «She was a little tired. She went to bed.»
For a long time afterward Anson believed that a protective God sometimes interfered in human affairs. But Dolly Karger, lying awake and staring at the ceiling, never again believed in anything at all.
VI
When Dolly married during the following autumn, Anson was in London on business. Like Paula’s marriage, it was sudden, but it affected him in a different way. At first he felt that it was funny, and had an inclination to laugh when he thought of it. Later it depressed him—it made him feel old.
There was something repetitive about it—why, Paula and Dolly had belonged to different generations. He had a foretaste of the sensation of a man of forty who hears that the daughter of an old flame has married. He wired congratulations and, as was not the case with Paula, they were sincere—he had never really hoped that Paula would be happy.
When he returned to New York, he was made a partner in the firm, and, as his responsibilities increased, he had less time on his hands. The refusal of a life-insurance company to issue him a policy made such an impression on him that he stopped drinking for a year, and claimed that he felt better physically, though I think he missed the convivial recounting of those Celliniesque adventures which, in his early twenties, had played such a part of his life. But he never abandoned the Yale Club. He was a figure there, a personality, and the tendency of his class, who were now seven years out of college, to drift away to more sober haunts was checked by his presence.
His day was never too full nor his mind too weary to give any sort of aid to any one who asked it. What had been done at first through pride and superiority had become a habit and a passion. And there was always something—a younger brother in trouble at New Haven, a quarrel to be patched up between a friend and his wife, a position to be found for this man, an investment for that. But his specialty was the solving of problems for young married people. Young married people fascinated him and their apartments were almost sacred to him—he knew the story of their love-affair, advised them where to live and how, and remembered their babies’ names. Toward young wives his attitude was circumspect: he never abused the trust which their husbands—strangely enough in view of his unconcealed irregularities—invariably reposed in him.
He came to take a vicarious pleasure in happy marriages, and to be inspired to an almost equally pleasant melancholy by those that went astray. Not a season passed that he did not witness the collapse of an affair that perhaps he himself had fathered. When Paula was divorced and almost immediately remarried to another Bostonian, he talked about her to me all one afternoon. He would never love any one as
