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 anyone as he had loved Paula, but he insisted that he no longer cared.
“I’ll never marry,” he came to say; “I’ve seen too much of it, and I know a happy marriage is a very rare thing. Besides, I’m too old.”
But he did believe in marriage. Like all men who spring from a happy and successful marriage, he believed in it passionately—nothing he had seen would change his belief, his cynicism dissolved upon it like air. But he did really believe he was too old. At twenty-eight he began to accept with equanimity the prospect of marrying without romantic love; he resolutely chose a New York girl of his own class, pretty, intelligent, congenial, above reproach—and set about falling in love with her. The things he had said to Paula with sincerity, to other girls with grace, he could no longer say at all without smiling, or with the force necessary to convince.
“When I’m forty,” he told his friends, “I’ll be ripe. I’ll fall for some chorus girl like the rest.”
Nevertheless, he persisted in his attempt. His mother wanted to see him married, and he could now well afford it—he had a seat on the Stock Exchange, and his earned income came to twenty-five thousand a year. The idea was agreeable: when his friends—he spent most of his time with the set he and Dolly had evolved—closed themselves in behind domestic doors at night, he no longer rejoiced in his freedom. He even wondered if he should have married Dolly. Not even Paula had loved him more, and he was learning the rarity, in a single life, of encountering true emotion.
Just as this mood began to creep over him a disquieting story reached his ear. His aunt Edna, a woman just this side of forty, was carrying on an open intrigue with a dissolute, hard-drinking young man named Cary Sloane. Everyone knew of it except Anson’s Uncle Robert, who for fifteen years had talked long in clubs and taken his wife for granted.
Anson heard the story again and again with increasing annoyance. Something of his old feeling for his uncle came back to him, a feeling that was more than personal, a reversion toward that family solidarity on which he had based his pride. His intuition singled out the essential point of the affair, which was that his uncle shouldn’t be hurt. It was his first experiment in unsolicited meddling, but with his knowledge of Edna’s character he felt that he could handle the matter better than a district judge or his uncle.
His uncle was in Hot Springs. Anson traced down the sources of the scandal so that there should be no possibility of mistake and then he called Edna and asked her to lunch with him at the Plaza next day. Something in his tone must have frightened her, for she was reluctant, but he insisted, putting off the date until she had no excuse for refusing.
She met him at the appointed time in the Plaza lobby, a lovely, faded, gray-eyed blonde in a coat of Russian sable. Five great rings, cold with diamonds and emeralds, sparkled on her slender hands. It occurred to Anson that it was his father’s intelligence and not his uncle’s that had earned the fur and the stones, the rich brilliance that buoyed up her passing beauty.
Though Edna scented his hostility, she was unprepared for the directness of his approach.
“Edna, I’m astonished at the way you’ve been acting,” he said in a strong, frank voice. “At first I couldn’t believe it.”
“Believe what?” she demanded sharply.
“You needn’t pretend with me, Edna. I’m talking about Cary Sloane. Aside from any other consideration, I didn’t think you could treat Uncle Robert—”
“Now look here, Anson—” she began angrily, but his peremptory voice broke through hers:
“—and your children in such a way. You’ve been married eighteen years, and you’re old enough to know better.”
“You can’t talk to me like that! You—”
“Yes, I can. Uncle Robert has always been my best friend.” He was tremendously moved. He felt a real distress about his uncle, about his three young cousins.
Edna stood up, leaving her crab-flake cocktail untasted.
“This is the silliest thing—”
“Very well, if you won’t listen to me I’ll go to Uncle Robert and tell him the whole story—he’s bound to hear it sooner or later. And afterward I’ll go to old Moses Sloane.”
Edna faltered back into her chair.
“Don’t talk so loud,” she begged him. Her eyes blurred with tears. “You have no idea how your voice carries. You might have chosen a less public place to make all these crazy accusations.”
He didn’t answer.
“Oh, you never liked me, I know,” she went on. “You’re just taking advantage of some silly gossip to try and break up the only interesting friendship I’ve ever had. What did I ever do to make you hate me so?”
Still Anson waited. There would be the appeal to his chivalry, then to his pity,
