of a string, as to whether the crab was fully conversant with the applications of the binomial theorem, and the aforementioned race in two hansom cabs with the sedate and impressive shadows of Fifth Avenue for audience, ending in a labyrinthine escape into the darkness of Central Park. Finally Anthony and Gloria had paid a call on some wild young married people — the Lacys — and collapsed in the empty milk bottles.
Morning now — theirs to add up the checks cashed here and there in clubs, stores, restaurants. Theirs to air the dank staleness of wine and cigarettes out of the tall blue front room, to pick up the broken glass and brush at the stained fabric of chairs and sofas; to give Bounds suits and dresses for the cleaners; finally, to take their smothery half-feverish bodies and faded depressed spirits out into the chill air of February, that life might go on and Wilson, Hiemer and Hardy obtain the services of a vigorous man at nine next morning.
“Do you remember,” called Anthony from the bathroom, “when Maury got out at the corner of One Hundred and Tenth Street and acted as a traffic cop, beckoning cars forward and motioning them back? They must have thought he was a private detective.”
After each reminiscence they both laughed inordinately, their overwrought nerves responding as acutely and janglingly to mirth as to depression.
Gloria at the mirror was wondering at the splendid color and freshness of her face — it seemed that she had never looked so well, though her stomach hurt her and her head was aching furiously.
The day passed slowly. Anthony, riding in a taxi to his broker’s to borrow money on a bond, found that he had only two dollars in his pocket. The fare would cost all of that, but he felt that on this particular afternoon he could not have endured the subway. When the taximetre reached his limit he must get out and walk.
With this his mind drifted off into one of its characteristic daydreams…. In this dream he discovered that the metre was going too fast — the driver had dishonestly adjusted it. Calmly he reached his destination and then nonchalantly handed the man what he justly owed him. The man showed fight, but almost before his hands were up Anthony had knocked him down with one terrific blow. And when he rose Anthony quickly sidestepped and floored him definitely with a crack in the temple.
… He was in court now. The judge had fined him five dollars and he had no money. Would the court take his check? Ah, but the court did not know him. Well, he could identify himself by having them call his apartment.
… They did so. Yes, it was Mrs. Anthony Patch speaking — but how did she know that this man was her husband? How could she know? Let the police sergeant ask her if she remembered the milk bottles …
He leaned forward hurriedly and tapped at the glass. The taxi was only at Brooklyn Bridge, but the metre showed a dollar and eighty cents, and Anthony would never have omitted the ten per cent tip.
Later in the afternoon he returned to the apartment. Gloria had also been out — shopping — and was asleep, curled in a corner of the sofa with her purchase locked securely in her arms. Her face was as untroubled as a little girl’s, and the bundle that she pressed tightly to her bosom was a child’s doll, a profound and infinitely healing balm to her disturbed and childish heart.
DESTINY
It was with this party, more especially with Gloria’s part in it, that a decided change began to come over their way of living. The magnificent attitude of not giving a damn altered overnight; from being a mere tenet of Gloria’s it became the entire solace and justification for what they chose to do and what consequence it brought. Not to be sorry, not to loose one cry of regret, to live according to a clear code of honor toward each other, and to seek the moment’s happiness as fervently and persistently as possible.
“No one cares about us but ourselves, Anthony,” she said one day. “It’d be ridiculous for me to go about pretending I felt any obligations toward the world, and as for worrying what people think about me, I simply don’t, that’s all. Since I was a little girl in dancing-school I’ve been criticised by the mothers of all the little girls who weren’t as popular as I was, and I’ve always looked on criticism as a sort of envious tribute.”
This was because of a party in the “Boul’ Mich’” one night, where Constance Merriam had seen her as one of a highly stimulated party of four. Constance Merriam, “as an old school friend,” had gone to the trouble of inviting her to lunch next day in order to inform her how terrible it was.
“I told her I couldn’t see it,” Gloria told Anthony. “Eric Merriam is a sort of sublimated Percy Wolcott — you remember that man in Hot Springs I told you about — his idea of respecting Constance is to leave her at home with her sewing and her baby and her book, and such innocuous amusements, whenever he’s going on a party that promises to be anything but deathly dull.”
“Did you tell her that?”
“I certainly did. And I told her that what she really objected to was that I was having a better time than she was.”
Anthony applauded her. He was tremendously proud of Gloria, proud that she never failed to eclipse whatever other women might be in the party, proud that men were always glad to revel with her in great rowdy groups, without any attempt to do more than enjoy her beauty and the warmth of her vitality.
These “parties” gradually became their chief source of entertainment. Still in love, still enormously interested in each other, they yet found as spring drew near that staying at home in the evening palled on them; books were unreal; the old magic of being alone had long since vanished — instead they preferred to be bored by a stupid musical comedy, or to go to dinner with the most uninteresting of their acquaintances, so long as there would be enough cocktails to keep the conversation from becoming utterly intolerable. A scattering of younger married people who had been their friends in school or college, as well as a varied assortment of single men, began to think instinctively of them whenever color and excitement were needed, so there was scarcely a day without its phone call, its “Wondered what you were doing this evening.” Wives, as a rule, were afraid of Gloria — her facile attainment of the centre of the stage, her innocent but nevertheless disturbing way of becoming a favorite with husbands — these things drove them instinctively into an attitude of profound distrust, heightened by the fact that Gloria was largely unresponsive to any intimacy shown her by a woman.
On the appointed Wednesday in February Anthony had gone to the imposing offices of Wilson, Hiemer and Hardy and listened to many vague instructions delivered by an energetic young man of about his own age, named Kahler, who wore a defiant yellow pompadour, and in announcing himself as an assistant secretary gave the impression that it was a tribute to exceptional ability.
“There’s two kinds of men here, you’ll find,” he said. “There’s the man who gets to be an assistant secretary or treasurer, gets his name on our folder here, before he’s thirty, and there’s the man who gets his name there at forty-five. The man who gets his name there at forty-five stays there the rest of his life.”
“How about the man who gets it there at thirty?” inquired Anthony politely.
“Why, he gets up here, you see.” He pointed to a list of assistant vice-presidents upon the folder. “Or maybe he gets to be president or secretary or treasurer.”
“And what about these over here?”
“Those? Oh, those are the trustees — the men with capital.”
“I see.”
“Now some people,” continued Kahler, “think that whether a man gets started early or late depends on whether he’s got a college education. But they’re wrong.”
“I see.”
“I had one; I was Buckleigh, class of nineteen-eleven, but when I came down to the Street I soon found that the things that would help me here weren’t the fancy things I learned in college. In fact, I had to get a lot of fancy stuff out of my head.”
Anthony could not help wondering what possible “fancy stuff” he had learned