“Hello, there!” Teddy cried cordially. “Did Helen sail?”
“Just now.”
“I met her on the street yesterday and she told me. I wanted you both to come to my concert. Well, she’s quite a heroine, going off like that… Have you met my wife?”
Stuart and Betty smiled at each other.
“We’ve met.”
“And I didn’t know it,” protested Teddy. “Women need watching when they get toward their dotage… Look here, Stuart; we’re having a few people up to the apartment. No heavy music or anything. Just supper and a few débutantes to tell me I was divine. It will do you good to come. I imagine you’re missing Helen like the devil.”
“I don’t think I—”
“Come along. They’ll tell you you’re divine too.”
Realizing that the invitation was inspired by kindliness, Stuart accepted. It was the sort of gathering he had seldom attended, and he was surprised to meet so many people he knew. Teddy played the lion in a manner at once assertive and skeptical. Stuart listened as he enlarged to Mrs. Cassius Ruthven on one of his favorite themes:
“People tried to make marriages cooperative and they’ve ended by becoming competitive. Impossible situation. Smart men will get to fight shy of ornamental women. A man ought to marry somebody who’ll be grateful, like Betty here.”
“Now don’t talk so much, Theodore Van Beck,” Betty interrupted. “Since you’re such a fine musician, you’d do well to express yourself with music instead of rash words.”
“I don’t agree with your husband,” said Mrs. Ruthven. “English girls hunt with their men and play politics with them on absolutely equal terms, and it tends to draw them together.”
“It does not,” insisted Teddy. “That’s why English society is the most disorganized in the world. Betty and I are happy because we haven’t any qualities in common at all.”
His exuberance grated on Stuart, and the success that flowed from him swung his mind back to the failure of his own life. He could not know that his life was not destined to be a failure. He could not read the fine story that three years later would be carved proud above his soldier’s grave, or know that his restless body, which never spared itself in sport or danger, was destined to give him one last proud gallop at the end.
“They turned me down,” he was saying to Mrs. Ruthven. “I’ll have to stick to Squadron A, unless we get drawn in.”
“So Helen’s gone.” Mrs. Ruthven looked at him, reminiscing. “I’ll never forget your wedding. You were both so handsome, so ideally suited to each other. Everybody spoke of it.”
Stuart remembered; for the moment it seemed that he had little else that it was fun to remember.
“Yes,” he agreed, nodding his head thoughtfully, “I suppose we were a handsome pair.”
