This Side of Paradise

THE END OF SUMMER

“No wind is stirring in the grass; not one wind stirs… the water in the hidden pools, as glass, fronts the full moon and so inters the golden token in its icy mass,” chanted Eleanor to the trees that skeletoned the body of the night. “Isn’t it ghostly here? If you can hold your horse’s feet up, let’s cut through the woods and find the hidden pools.”

“It’s after one, and you’ll get the devil,” he objected, “and I don’t know enough about horses to put one away in the pitch dark.”

“Shut up, you old fool,” she whispered irrelevantly, and, leaning over, she patted him lazily with her riding-crop. “You can leave your old plug in our stable and I’ll send him over to-morrow.”

“But my uncle has got to drive me to the station with this old plug at seven o’clock.”

“Don’t be a spoil-sport – remember, you have a tendency toward wavering that prevents you from being the entire light of my life.”

Amory drew his horse up close beside, and, leaning toward her, grasped her hand.

“Say I am —quick, or I’ll pull you over and make you ride behind me.”

She looked up and smiled and shook her head excitedly.

“Oh, do! – or rather, don’t! Why are all the exciting things so uncomfortable, like fighting and exploring and ski-ing in Canada? By the way, we’re going to ride up Harper’s Hill. I think that comes in our programme about five o’clock.”

“You little devil,” Amory growled. “You’re going to make me stay up all night and sleep in the train like an immigrant all day to-morrow, going back to New York.”

“Hush! some one’s coming along the road – let’s go! Whoo-ee-oop!” And with a shout that probably gave the belated traveller a series of shivers, she turned her horse into the woods and Amory followed slowly, as he had followed her all day for three weeks.

The summer was over, but he had spent the days in watching Eleanor, a graceful, facile Manfred, build herself intellectual and imaginative pyramids while she revelled in the artificialities of the temperamental teens and they wrote poetry at the dinner-table.

When Vanity kissed Vanity, a hundred happy Junes ago, he pondered o’er her breathlessly, and, that all men might ever know, he rhymed her eyes with life and death:

“Thru Time I’ll save my love!” he said… yet Beauty vanished with his breath, and, with her lovers, she was dead…

– Ever his wit and not her eyes, ever his art and not her hair: “Who’d learn a trick in rhyme, be wise and pause before his sonnet there”… So all my words, however true, might sing you to a thousandth June, and no one ever know that you wereBeauty for an afternoon.

So he wrote one day, when he pondered how coldly we thought of the “Dark Lady of the Sonnets,” and how little we remembered her as the great man wanted her remembered. For what Shakespeare must have desired, to have been able to write with such divine despair, was that the lady should live… and now we have no real interest in her… The irony of it is that if he had cared more for the poem than for the lady the sonnet would be only obvious, imitative rhetoric and no one would ever have read it after twenty years…

This was the last night Amory ever saw Eleanor. He was leaving in the morning and they had agreed to take a long farewell trot by the cold moonlight. She wanted to talk, she said – perhaps the last time in her life that she could be rational (she meant pose with comfort). So they had turned into the woods and rode for half an hour with scarcely a word, except when she whispered “Damn!” at a bothersome branch – whispered it as no other girl was ever able to whisper it. Then they started up Harper’s Hill, walking their tired horses.

“Good Lord! It’s quiet here!” whispered Eleanor; “much more lonesome than the woods.”

“I hate woods,” Amory said, shuddering. “Any kind of foliage or underbrush at night. Out here it’s so broad and easy on the spirit.”

“The long slope of a long hill.”

“And the cold moon rolling moonlight down it.”

“And thee and me, last and most important.”

It was quiet that night – the straight road they followed up to the edge of the cliff knew few footsteps at any time. Only an occasional negro cabin, silver-gray in the rock-ribbed moonlight, broke the long line of bare ground; behind lay the black edge of the woods like a dark frosting on white cake, and ahead the sharp, high horizon. It was much colder – so cold that it settled on them and drove all the warm nights from their minds.

“The end of summer,” said Eleanor softly. “Listen to the beat of our horses’ hoofs – ‘tump-tump-tump-a-tump.’ Have you ever been feverish and had all noises divide into ‘tump-tump-tump’ until you could swear eternity was divisible into so many tumps? That’s the way I feel – old horses go tump-tump… I guess that’s the only thing that separates horses and clocks from us. Human beings can’t go ‘tump-tump-tump’ without going crazy.”

The breeze freshened and Eleanor pulled her cape around her and shivered.

“Are you very cold?” asked Amory.

“No, I’m thinking about myself – my black old inside self, the real one, with the fundamental honesty that keeps me from being absolutely wicked by making me realize my own sins.”

They were riding up close by the cliff and Amory gazed over. Where the fall met the ground a hundred feet below, a black stream made a sharp line, broken by tiny glints in the swift water.

“Rotten, rotten old world,” broke out Eleanor suddenly, “and the wretchedest thing of all is me – oh, why am I a girl? Why am I not a stupid – ? Look at you; you’re stupider than I am, not much, but some, and you can lope about and get bored and then lope somewhere else, and you can play around with girls without being involved in meshes of sentiment, and you can do anything and be justified – and here am I with the brains to do everything, yet tied to the sinking ship of future matrimony. If I were born a hundred years from now, well and good, but now what’s in store for me – I have to marry, that goes without saying. Who? I’m too bright for most men, and yet I have to descend to their level and let them patronize my intellect in order to get their attention. Every year that I don’t marry I’ve got less chance for a first-class man. At the best I can have my choice from one or two cities and, of course, I have to marry into a dinner-coat.

“Listen,” she leaned close again, “I like clever men and good-looking men, and, of course, no one cares more for personality than I do. Oh, just one person in fifty has any glimmer of what sex is. I’m hipped on Freud and all that, but it’s rotten that every bit of real love in the world is ninety-nine per cent passion and one little soupcon of jealousy.” She finished as suddenly as she began.

“Of course, you’re right,” Amory agreed. “It’s a rather unpleasant overpowering force that’s part of the machinery under everything. It’s like an actor that lets you see his mechanics! Wait a minute till I think this out…”

He paused and tried to get a metaphor. They had turned the cliff and were riding along the road about fifty feet to the left.

“You see every one’s got to have some cloak to throw around it. The mediocre intellects, Plato’s second class, use the remnants of romantic chivalry diluted with Victorian sentiment – and we who consider ourselves the intellectuals cover it up by pretending that it’s another side of us, has nothing to do with our shining brains; we pretend that the fact that we realize it is really absolving us from being a prey to it. But the truth is that sex is right in the middle of our purest abstractions, so close that it obscures vision… I can kiss you now and will. …” He leaned toward her in his saddle, but she drew away.

“I can’t – I can’t kiss you now – I’m more sensitive.”

“You’re more stupid then,” he declared rather impatiently. “Intellect is no protection from sex any more than convention is…”

“What is?” she fired up. “The Catholic Church or the maxims of Confucius?”

Amory looked up, rather taken aback.

“That’s your panacea, isn’t it?” she cried. “Oh, you’re just an old hypocrite, too. Thousands of scowling priests keeping the degenerate Italians and illiterate Irish repentant with gabble-gabble about the sixth and ninth commandments. It’s just all cloaks, sentiment and spiritual rouge and panaceas. I’ll tell you there is no God, not even a definite abstract goodness; so it’s all got to be worked out for the individual by the individual here in high white foreheads like mine, and you’re too much the prig to admit it.” She let go her reins and shook her little fists at the stars.

“If there’s a God let him strike me – strike me!”

“Talking about God again after the manner of atheists,” Amory said sharply. His materialism, always a thin cloak, was torn to shreds by Eleanor’s blasphemy… She knew it and it angered him that she knew it.

“And like most intellectuals who don’t find faith convenient,” he continued coldly, “like Napoleon and Oscar Wilde and the rest of your type, you’ll yell loudly for a priest on your death-bed.”

Eleanor drew her horse up sharply and he reined in beside her.

“Will I?” she said in a queer voice that scared him. “Will I? Watch! I’m going over the cliff!” And before he could interfere she had turned and was riding breakneck for the end of the plateau.

He wheeled and started after her, his body like ice, his nerves in a vast clangor. There was no chance of stopping her. The moon was under a cloud and her horse would step blindly over. Then some ten feet from the edge of the cliff she gave a sudden shriek and flung herself sideways – plunged from her horse and, rolling over twice, landed in a pile of brush five feet from the edge. The horse went over with a frantic whinny. In a minute he was by Eleanor’s side and saw that her eyes were open.

“Eleanor!” he cried.

She did not answer, but her lips moved and her eyes filled with sudden tears.

“Eleanor, are you hurt?”

“No; I don’t think so,” she said faintly, and then began weeping.

“My horse dead?”

“Good God – Yes!”

“Oh!” she wailed. “I thought I was going over. I didn’t know – ”

He helped her gently to her feet and boosted her onto his saddle. So they started homeward; Amory walking and she bent forward on the pommel, sobbing bitterly.

“I’ve got a crazy streak,” she faltered, “twice before I’ve done things like that. When I was eleven mother went – went mad – stark raving crazy. We were in Vienna – ”

All the way back she talked haltingly about herself, and Amory’s love waned slowly with the moon. At her door they started from habit to kiss good night, but she could not run into his arms, nor were they stretched to meet her as in the week before. For a minute they stood there, hating each other with a bitter sadness. But as Amory had loved himself in Eleanor, so now what he hated was only a mirror. Their poses were strewn about the pale dawn like broken glass. The stars were long gone and there were left only the little sighing gusts of wind and the silences between… but naked souls are poor things ever, and soon he turned homeward and let new lights come in with the sun.

A POEM THAT ELEANOR SENT AMORY SEVERAL YEARS LATER

 
“Here, Earth-born, over the lilt of the water,
    Lisping its music and bearing a burden of light,
  Bosoming day as a laughing and radiant daughter…
    Here we may whisper unheard, unafraid of the night.
  Walking alone… was it splendor, or what, we were bound with,
    Deep in the time when summer lets down her hair?
  Shadows we loved and the patterns they covered the ground with
    Tapestries, mystical, faint in the breathless air.
 
 
  That was the day… and the night for another story,
    Pale as a dream and shadowed with pencilled trees —
  Ghosts of the stars came by who had sought for glory,
    Whispered to us of peace in the plaintive breeze,
  Whispered of old dead faiths that the day had shattered,
    Youth the penny that bought delight of the moon;
  That was the urge that we knew and the language that mattered
    That was the debt that we paid to the usurer June.
 
 
  Here, deepest of dreams, by the waters that bring not
    Anything back of the past that we need not know,
  What if the light is but sun and the little streams sing not,
    We are together, it seems… I have loved you so…
  What did the last night hold, with the summer over,
    Drawing us back to the home in the changing glade?
  What leered out of the dark in the ghostly clover?    God!.. till you stirred in your sleep… and were wild
      afraid…
 
 
  Well… we have passed… we are chronicle now to the eerie.
    Curious metal from meteors that failed in the sky;
  Earth-born the tireless is stretched by the water, quite weary,
    Close to this ununderstandable changeling that’s I…
  Fear is an echo we traced to Security’s daughter;
    Now we are faces and voices… and less, too soon,
  Whispering half-love over the lilt of the water…
    Youth the penny that bought delight of the moon.”
 

A POEM AMORY SENT TO ELEANOR AND WHICH HE CALLED “SUMMER STORM”

 
   “Faint winds, and a song fading and leaves falling,
    Faint winds, and far away a fading laughter…
    And the rain and over the fields a voice calling…
 
 
    Our gray blown cloud scurries and lifts above,
    Slides on the sun and flutters there to waft her
    Sisters on.  The shadow of a dove
    Falls on the cote, the trees are filled with wings;
    And down the valley through the crying trees
    The body of the darker storm flies; brings
    With its new air the breath of sunken seas
    And slender tenuous thunder…
                                  But I wait…
    Wait for the mists and for the blacker rain —
    Heavier winds that stir the veil of fate,
    Happier winds that pile her hair;
                                  Again
    They tear me, teach me, strew the heavy air
    Upon me, winds that I know, and storm.
 
 
    There was a summer every rain was rare;
    There was a season every wind was warm…
    And now you pass me in the mist… your hair
    Rain-blown about you, damp lips curved once more
    In that wild irony, that gay despair
    That made you old when we have met before;
    Wraith-like you drift on out before the rain,
    Across the fields, blown with the stemless flowers,
    With your old hopes, dead leaves and loves again —
    Dim as a dream and wan with all old hours
    (Whispers will creep into the growing dark…
    Tumult will die over the trees)
                                  Now night
    Tears from her wetted breast the splattered blouse
    Of day, glides down the dreaming hills, tear-bright,
    To cover with her hair the eerie green…
    Love for the dusk… Love for the glistening after;
    Quiet the trees to their last tops… serene…
 
 
    Faint winds, and far away a fading laughter…”
 

CHAPTER 4. The Supercilious Sacrifice

Atlantic City. Amory paced the board walk at day’s end, lulled by the everlasting surge of changing waves, smelling the half-mournful odor of the salt breeze. The sea, he thought, had treasured its memories deeper than the faithless land. It seemed still to whisper of Norse galleys ploughing the water world under raven-figured flags, of the British dreadnoughts, gray bulwarks of civilization steaming up through the fog of one dark July into the North Sea.

“Well – Amory Blaine!”

Amory looked down into the street below. A low racing car had drawn to a stop and a familiar cheerful face protruded from the driver’s seat.

“Come on down, goopher!” cried Alec.

Amory called a greeting and descending a flight of wooden steps approached the car. He and Alec had been meeting intermittently, but the barrier of Rosalind lay always between them. He was sorry for this; he hated to lose Alec.

“Mr. Blaine, this is Miss Waterson, Miss Wayne, and Mr. Tully.”

“How d’y do?”

“Amory,” said Alec exuberantly, “if you’ll jump in we’ll take you to some secluded nook and give you a wee jolt of Bourbon.”

Amory considered.

“That’s an idea.”

“Step in – move over, Jill, and Amory will smile very handsomely at you.”

Amory squeezed into the back seat beside a gaudy, vermilion-lipped blonde.

“Hello, Doug Fairbanks,” she said flippantly. “Walking for exercise or hunting for company?”

“I was counting the waves,” replied Amory gravely. “I’m going in for statistics.”

“Don’t kid me, Doug.”

When they reached an unfrequented side street Alec stopped the car among deep shadows.

“What you doing down here these cold days, Amory?” he demanded, as he produced a quart of Bourbon from under the fur rug.

Amory avoided the question. Indeed, he had had no definite reason for coming to the coast.

“Do you remember that party of ours, sophomore year?” he asked instead.

“Do I? When we slept in the pavilions up in Asbury Park – ”

“Lord, Alec! It’s hard to think that Jesse and Dick and Kerry are all three dead.”

Alec shivered.

“Don’t talk about it. These dreary fall days depress me enough.”

Jill seemed to agree.

“Doug here is sorta gloomy anyways,” she commented. “Tell him to drink deep – it’s good and scarce these days.”

“What I really want to ask you, Amory, is where you are – ”

“Why, New York, I suppose – ”

“I mean to-night, because if you haven’t got a room yet you’d better help me out.”

“Glad to.”

“You see, Tully and I have two rooms with bath between at the Ranier, and he’s got to go back to New York. I don’t want to have to move. Question is, will you occupy one of the rooms?”

Amory was willing, if he could get in right away.

“You’ll find the key in the office; the rooms are in my name.”

Declining further locomotion or further stimulation, Amory left the car and sauntered back along the board walk to the hotel.

He was in an eddy again, a deep, lethargic gulf, without desire to work or write, love or dissipate. For the first time in his life he rather longed for death to roll over his generation, obliterating their petty fevers and struggles and exultations. His youth seemed never so vanished as now in the contrast between the utter loneliness of this visit and that riotous, joyful party of four years before. Things that had been the merest commonplaces of his life then, deep sleep, the sense of beauty around him, all desire, had flown away and the gaps they left were filled only with the great listlessness of his disillusion.

“To hold a man a woman has to appeal to the worst in him.” This sentence was the thesis of most of his bad nights, of which he felt this was to be one. His mind had already started to play variations on the subject. Tireless passion, fierce jealousy, longing to possess and crush – these alone were left of all his love for Rosalind; these remained to him as payment for the loss of his youth – bitter calomel under the thin sugar of love’s exaltation.

In his room he undressed and wrapping himself in blankets to keep out the chill October air drowsed in an armchair by the open window.

He remembered a poem he had read months before:

 
   “Oh staunch old heart who toiled so long for me,
    I waste my years sailing along the sea – ”
 

Yet he had no sense of waste, no sense of the present hope that waste implied. He felt that life had rejected him.

“Rosalind! Rosalind!” He poured the words softly into the half-darkness until she seemed to permeate the room; the wet salt breeze filled his hair with moisture, the rim of a moon seared the sky and made the curtains dim and ghostly. He fell asleep.

When he awoke it was very late and quiet. The blanket had slipped partly off his shoulders and he touched his skin to find it damp and cold.

Then he became aware of a tense whispering not ten feet away.

He became rigid.

“Don’t make a sound!” It was Alec’s voice. “Jill – do you hear me?”

“Yes – ” breathed very low, very frightened. They were in the bathroom.

Then his ears caught a louder sound from somewhere along the corridor outside. It was a mumbling of men’s voices and a repeated muffled rapping. Amory threw off the blankets and moved close to the bathroom door.

“My God!” came the girl’s voice again. “You’ll have to let them in.”

“Sh!”

Suddenly a steady, insistent knocking began at Amory’s hall door and simultaneously out of the bathroom came Alec, followed by the vermilion-lipped girl. They were both clad in pajamas.

“Amory!” an anxious whisper.

“What’s the trouble?”

“It’s house detectives. My God, Amory – they’re just looking for a test-case – ”

“Well, better let them in.”

“You don’t understand. They can get me under the Mann Act.”

The girl followed him slowly, a rather miserable, pathetic figure in the darkness.

Amory tried to plan quickly.

“You make a racket and let them in your room,” he suggested anxiously, “and I’ll get her out by this door.”

“They’re here too, though. They’ll watch this door.”

“Can’t you give a wrong name?”

“No chance. I registered under my own name; besides, they’d trail the auto license number.”

“Say you’re married.”

“Jill says one of the house detectives knows her.”

The girl had stolen to the bed and tumbled upon it; lay there listening wretchedly to the knocking which had grown gradually to a pounding. Then came a man’s voice, angry and imperative:

“Open up or we’ll break the door in!”

In the silence when this voice ceased Amory realized that there were other things in the room besides people… over and around the figure crouched on the bed there hung an aura, gossamer as a moonbeam, tainted as stale, weak wine, yet a horror, diffusively brooding already over the three of them… and over by the window among the stirring curtains stood something else, featureless and indistinguishable, yet strangely familiar… Simultaneously two great cases presented themselves side by side to Amory; all that took place in his mind, then, occupied in actual time less than ten seconds.

The first fact that flashed radiantly on his comprehension was the great impersonality of sacrifice – he perceived that what we call love and hate, reward and punishment, had no more to do with it than the date of the month. He quickly recapitulated the story of a sacrifice he had heard of in college: a man had cheated in an examination; his roommate in a gust of sentiment had taken the entire blame – due to the shame of it the innocent one’s entire future seemed shrouded in regret and failure, capped by the ingratitude of the real culprit. He had finally taken his own life – years afterward the facts had come out. At the time the story had both puzzled and worried Amory. Now he realized the truth; that sacrifice was no purchase of freedom. It was like a great elective office, it was like an inheritance of power – to certain people at certain times an essential luxury, carrying with it not a guarantee but a responsibility, not a security but an infinite risk. Its very momentum might drag him down to ruin – the passing of the emotional wave that made it possible might leave the one who made it high and dry forever on an island of despair.

… Amory knew that afterward Alec would secretly hate him for having done so much for him…

… All this was flung before Amory like an opened scroll, while ulterior to him and speculating upon him were those two breathless, listening forces: the gossamer aura that hung over and about the girl and that familiar thing by the window.

Sacrifice by its very nature was arrogant and impersonal; sacrifice should be eternally supercilious.

Weep not for me but for thy children.

That – thought Amory – would be somehow the way God would talk to me.

Amory felt a sudden surge of joy and then like a face in a motion-picture the aura over the bed faded out; the dynamic shadow by the window, that was as near as he could name it, remained for the fraction of a moment and then the breeze seemed to lift it swiftly out of the room. He clinched his hands in quick ecstatic excitement… the ten seconds were up…

“Do what I say, Alec – do what I say. Do you understand?”

Alec looked at him dumbly – his face a tableau of anguish.

“You have a family,” continued Amory slowly. “You have a family and it’s important that you should get out of this. Do you hear me?” He repeated clearly what he had said. “Do you hear me?”

“I hear you.” The voice was curiously strained, the eyes never for a second left Amory’s.

“Alec, you’re going to lie down here. If any one comes in you act drunk. You do what I say – if you don’t I’ll probably kill you.”

There was another moment while they stared at each other. Then Amory went briskly to the bureau and, taking his pocket-book, beckoned peremptorily to the girl. He heard one word from Alec that sounded like “penitentiary,” then he and Jill were in the bathroom with the door bolted behind them.

“You’re here with me,” he said sternly. “You’ve been with me all evening.”

She nodded, gave a little half cry.

In a second he had the door of the other room open and three men entered. There was an immediate flood of electric light and he stood there blinking.

“You’ve been playing a little too dangerous a game, young man!”

Amory laughed.

“Well?”

The leader of the trio nodded authoritatively at a burly man in a check suit.

“All right, Olson.”

“I got you, Mr. O’May,” said Olson, nodding. The other two took a curious glance at their quarry and then withdrew, closing the door angrily behind them.

The burly man regarded Amory contemptuously.

“Didn’t you ever hear of the Mann Act? Coming down here with her,” he indicated the girl with his thumb, “with a New York license on your car – to a hotel like this.” He shook his head implying that he had struggled over Amory but now gave him up.

“Well,” said Amory rather impatiently, “what do you want us to do?”

“Get dressed, quick – and tell your friend not to make such a racket.” Jill was sobbing noisily on the bed, but at these words she subsided sulkily and, gathering up her clothes, retired to the bathroom. As Amory slipped into Alec’s B. V. D.‘s he found that his attitude toward the situation was agreeably humorous. The aggrieved virtue of the burly man made him want to laugh.

“Anybody else here?” demanded Olson, trying to look keen and ferret-like.

“Fellow who had the rooms,” said Amory carelessly. “He’s drunk as an owl, though. Been in there asleep since six o’clock.”

“I’ll take a look at him presently.”

“How did you find out?” asked Amory curiously.

“Night clerk saw you go up-stairs with this woman.”

Amory nodded; Jill reappeared from the bathroom, completely if rather untidily arrayed.

“Now then,” began Olson, producing a note-book, “I want your real names – no damn John Smith or Mary Brown.”

“Wait a minute,” said Amory quietly. “Just drop that big-bully stuff. We merely got caught, that’s all.”

Olson glared at him.

“Name?” he snapped.

Amory gave his name and New York address.

“And the lady?”

“Miss Jill – ”

“Say,” cried Olson indignantly, “just ease up on the nursery rhymes. What’s your name? Sarah Murphy? Minnie Jackson?”

“Oh, my God!” cried the girl cupping her tear-stained face in her hands. “I don’t want my mother to know. I don’t want my mother to know.”

“Come on now!”

“Shut up!” cried Amory at Olson.

An instant’s pause.

“Stella Robbins,” she faltered finally. “General Delivery, Rugway, New Hampshire.”

Olson snapped his note-book shut and looked at them very ponderously.

“By rights the hotel could turn the evidence over to the police and you’d go to penitentiary, you would, for bringin’ a girl from one State to ‘nother f’r immoral purp’ses – ” He paused to let the majesty of his words sink in. “But – the hotel is going to let you off.”

“It doesn’t want to get in the papers,” cried Jill fiercely. “Let us off! Huh!”

A great lightness surrounded Amory. He realized that he was safe and only then did he appreciate the full enormity of what he might have incurred.

“However,” continued Olson, “there’s a protective association among the hotels. There’s been too much of this stuff, and we got a ‘rangement with the newspapers so that you get a little free publicity. Not the name of the hotel, but just a line sayin’ that you had a little trouble in ‘lantic City. See?”

“I see.”

“You’re gettin’ off light – damn light – but – ”

“Come on,” said Amory briskly. “Let’s get out of here. We don’t need a valedictory.”

Olson walked through the bathroom and took a cursory glance at Alec’s still form. Then he extinguished the lights and motioned them to follow him. As they walked into the elevator Amory considered a piece of bravado – yielded finally. He reached out and tapped Olson on the arm.

“Would you mind taking off your hat? There’s a lady in the elevator.”

Olson’s hat came off slowly. There was a rather embarrassing two minutes under the lights of the lobby while the night clerk and a few belated guests stared at them curiously; the loudly dressed girl with bent head, the handsome young man with his chin several points aloft; the inference was quite obvious. Then the chill outdoors – where the salt air was fresher and keener still with the first hints of morning.

“You can get one of those taxis and beat it,” said Olson, pointing to the blurred outline of two machines whose drivers were presumably asleep inside.

“Good-by,” said Olson. He reached in his pocket suggestively, but Amory snorted, and, taking the girl’s arm, turned away.

“Where did you tell the driver to go?” she asked as they whirled along the dim street.

“The station.”

“If that guy writes my mother – ”

“He won’t. Nobody’ll ever know about this – except our friends and enemies.”

Dawn was breaking over the sea.

“It’s getting blue,” she said.

“It does very well,” agreed Amory critically, and then as an after-thought: “It’s almost breakfast-time – do you want something to eat?”

“Food – ” she said with a cheerful laugh. “Food is what queered the party. We ordered a big supper to be sent up to the room about two o’clock. Alec didn’t give the waiter a tip, so I guess the little bastard snitched.”

Jill’s low spirits seemed to have gone faster than the scattering night. “Let me tell you,” she said emphatically, “when you want to stage that sorta party stay away from liquor, and when you want to get tight stay away from bedrooms.”

“I’ll remember.”

He tapped suddenly at the glass and they drew up at the door of an all-night restaurant.

“Is Alec a great friend of yours?” asked Jill as they perched themselves on high stools inside, and set their elbows on the dingy counter.