friends. A way of rewriting life so as to fit himself with the heroic part, as yet denied him in the manuscript and which he sincerely felt was his due.
"Yes, she cried a bit. They usually do, you know."
Keegan was innocent of this phenomenon, but nodded. He felt mysteriously saddened by the fact that they never wept for him. Life denied him many things. The creature he had spent the night with had treated him somewhat brutally. She had laughed several times. He sought, however, to make up for the indifference with which he felt himself treated by heightening his contempt for her as a sinner. This necessitated an increase of his contempt for himself as having been a partner in evil. But that was a spiritual gesture made bearable by the wave of remorse it aroused and by the knowledge that remorse was a laudable emotion. Nevertheless, despite the remorse and the rehabilitation it offered his vanity, he continued to feel—life denied him many things.
Basine continued, "You could take a girl like that and make something of her. Give her a month." By which he meant give George Cornelius Basine a month and see the miracle he would work.
Keegan sighed. He admired George, and his admiration of others always depressed him. He was intelligent enough to know that he admired things he lacked. And yet, he assured himself, he would despise the things in himself that he admired in others. Therefore, it was very probable that he despised them in others, or would at some later day, unless he managed to conceal the fact or lose track of it in the confusion of platitudes which served him for a brain. He looked enviously at his friend, before whom hardened trollops dissolved in tears.
"She's only been in the game a little while, you know, Hugh. A convent girl, too. She told me her story. How she got started, you know. A love affair with a Spaniard. A highly connected fellow."
Basine prattled on, improvising a melodrama of virtue led astray, editing the vaguely worded generalities of the creature he had left asleep. Eventually he tired of the game and announced abruptly.
"Not a car in sight. What do you say we walk, Hugh?"
The idea of walking four miles home after a wild night engaged his vanity. Things by which he proved the dubious superiority of his body pleased him.
"I think I'll run along," said Keegan.
"Nothing doing, Hughie. You come with me. We'll have breakfast at my house."
Keegan frowned. There were two sisters and a mother in Basine's home.
"I can't."
"Why not?"
"Oh, because."
Basine persisted, gently malicious. It amused him to inconvenience his friend's scruples. It also gave him a feeling of moral supremacy. Keegan was ashamed to go to his home with him. He pitied him for this and yet enjoyed the fact. It was because Keegan didn't feel sure of himself, of his being a man of virtue. And he, Basine, did. There was no question about it in his mind.
"Ashamed?" he asked with a smile.
"No," Keegan grunted.
"Well, you haven't done anything worse than me," by which he meant "We do things differently and I am above things that knock you out."
Keegan stared at his friend furtively. There were things inexplicable in George Basine. He must admire them. There was nothing inexplicable in himself.
He hesitated about going, however. A combination of platitudes was involved. He felt the necessity of repentance. And then he felt the necessity of hiding his shame. And finally platitude cautioned him indignantly against affronting three good women—a mother and two daughters—with the presence of one lately come from the flesh pots of Satan. This was a superior platitude because it came also under the index of good manners.
But Basine, taking him by the elbow, swept him along, platitudes and all. An inexplicable Basine whom he admired, envied, despised, and who was his best friend and his model. They walked together, Basine briskly to hide the sudden heaviness of his legs; Keegan yielding to the less pronounced physical drain he had undergone and falling into a weary, protesting gait.
2
The death of Howard Basine had precipitated a creditable outburst of grief on the part of his widow and two daughters. The event had brought his son George home from college.
They had shared a bed for twenty-six years, Basine père and Basine mère, achieving an utter disregard of each other which both took pride in identifying as domestic happiness. In their youth love had brought them together while comparative strangers. And after twenty-six years death had parted them still strangers. But now complete and total strangers—Siamese twins who had never been introduced to each other.
Each had grown old by the side of the other, subscribing to the same thoughts, worries, ambitions. It was as if a thin shell had grown around each of them. This shell was their home, their mutual interest in bank balances, diversions and tomorrows. It was the product of their practical energies—their standing in the eyes of their friends, their success and their solidity as a social unit. It was their pride in new rugs, in invitations to functions, in their children.
There were two shells. One was Basine père. One was Basine mère. For twenty-six years these two shells cohabited together. But inside each of them there had been a world of things that had never connected and that remained forever part of a mutually preserved secret. Little daydreams, absurdities, the swaggering, pensive, impractical rigmarole of thought-life to which the world of reality—the shell-world—had remained almost to the last no more than a vaguely sensed exterior.
Each of them had lived almost continually apart from this shell. They had given but a fraction of their energies toward its creation. It had required only a little part of themselves to become two placidly successful conventionally happy people with a home and family. The rest of themselves they had allowed to evaporate.
A pleasing process—evaporation. Dreams, ambitions, longings—all these had evaporated slowly and secretively during the twenty-six years, vanished into thin air. And each had been preoccupied with this process of evaporation. It had been their real life—the life which diverted them and which they mutually concealed from each other as they sat together reading of evenings, or rode in cars or waited in offices or lay in bed.
Here in this real life were success and beauty and marvelous activities. Here Basine père planned Herculean enterprise and triumphed with magnificent gestures, became a leader of finance, of armies; became a lover of queens and odalisques. Caressing from day to day phantasms which had no existence, it was in them that he chiefly existed. He confined himself not only to illusions of grandeur. There were also little things, charming minor victories which delighted his ego almost as much as the greater ones. He was able to trick out the minor victories with the illusion of reality. They were things that might happen, that one could dream about almost as actually happening. Things that he fancied people might be saying about him; admissions that he fancied people might make to him; dreams that he fancied he inspired in women who passed him and whom he never saw again.
This illusory existence preoccupying Basine had fitted him ideally for the companionship of orderly, placid-minded folk preoccupied like himself with similar processes of evaporation. These folk were his friends with whom he went to the theater, played cards, transacted business, discussed issues. They were known as normal, practical persons. The vast, illusory worlds in which they lived during the greater part of their hours in no way encroached upon the realities of their day.
They were proud of having a grip on themselves, by which they meant of being able to allow their energies to evaporate secretively instead of feeling inspired to harness them to realities and run the risk of being hoisted body and soul out of their shells into a maelstrom of uncertainties and hullabaloos. In order to rationalize the disparity between their actual estates and the fantastic estates of their illusory lives, they devoted a part of their energies to