He softly touched her wet eyes with his handkerchief … How could she have stood there, calmly submitting to his impudent attentions? … What had she been thinking of to allow herself to be placed in such an impossible predicament? What a beast he had been to make capital of her yearning for a bit of human kindness … at a moment when, he knew, her whole world was breaking up under her feet! … Well, he surely was made aware, before he left, what she thought of his despicable treatment of her! … Hadn’t she told him, so bitterly, so scathingly, that he had cringed under it? … But—that was small balm for her injured pride … She had actually stood with her forehead pressed against his arm, while his slim fingers caressed her hair, utterly unable to exert her will … dreamily visioning a thin trickle of fine sand pouring into a small red-brown heap at the bottom of an hourglass … and wondering how to shut it off … Why—she must have been hypnotized!
“Won’t you forgive me—now?” he whispered.
Why couldn’t she have freed herself, smiled; agreed—in a matter-of-fact tone, “I’ll not hold anything against you. Good night.” … She repeated into her pillow several variants of that commonplace, devoutly wishing she could remember having said it; trying to persuade herself she really had.
But he had pleaded so wistfully! … She had lifted her eyes, and her lips were parted to speak a single word of friendly assurance when—it happened … And she had offered no resistance! … Oh—how cheap he must think her! How little respect he had had for her—widowed because of him—and, worst of all, he would probably be cad enough to imagine that she had responded to his kiss … It was the haunting fear he might think she had shared it that tortured her most.
Of course—she had done what she could, quickly, savagely, to reinstate herself in his regard. Breaking free, she had pushed him from her; forbade him ever to speak to her again; left the room in a grand state of emotional tumult without so much as pausing to glance at the stupefied Joyce, heavily sleeping through a scene that could not have failed to interest her, had she been aware of it.
Seated before her mirror at nine, gazing remorsefully at her haggard reflection, she straightened, stiffly, and said aloud, “Well, whatever he may care to think, I’m certain I didn’t.”
Sleepy servants at the Columbia Club grinned and exchanged winks when Bobby arrived at a quarter to four, sullen and dishevelled.
“Teddy,” he growled to the elevator boy, “bring me a bottle of Scotch and a syphon of soda.”
He disrobed, mixed a stiff drink, and another, and a third, in swift succession, scowled hatefully at himself in the bathroom mirror and muttered “Piker!” … He had forfeited the thing he most wanted—the only thing he wanted in this world! … Now she would never consent to see him again … She had said it, and she meant it. He had imposed upon her kindness; had stampeded her into an impetuous response to his sympathy which she would regret with self-loathing … What was the good of anything—now?
The Hudson journal lay on the desk where he had left it; a sheaf of club stationery beside it, scrawled with rows of letters.
He gave the book a contemptuous push with the back of his hand and it fell into the wastebasket.
“Damned silly nonsense!” he muttered. “To hell with all that kind of blah!”
XI
“Please be seated, Mr. Merrick,” the secretary had said, stiffly, twenty minutes ago. “Dean Whitley is busy now.”
A qualitative analysis of Mr. Merrick’s scowl as he sat fidgeting would have resolved it into two parts curiosity, three parts anxiety and the remainder annoyance … Of chagrin—a trace.
The note had said eleven, and he had entered while the clock was striking. It had not specified what the dean wished to see him about. That would have been too much to expect. Courtesy and consideration were against the rules governing the official action of deans.
Big universities, like monopolistic public utilities and internal revenue offices, enjoyed high-hatting their constituencies; liked to make an impressive swank with their authority; liked to keep people waiting, guessing, worrying; liked to put ’em to all the bother possible.
Mr. Merrick glowered. He glowered first at the large photograph of an autopsy suspended above the secretary’s desk in the corner … Seven doctors owling it over a corpse. All of the doctors were paunchy, their pendulous chins giving them the appearance of a covey of white pelicans. They were baggy under the eyes … a lot of fat ghosts swathed in shrouds. The corpse too was fat. Why conduct a post over this bird? Any layman could see at a glance what had ailed him—he was a glutton. Let these wiseacres take warning in the presence of this plump cadaver, and go on a diet of curds and spinach before some committee put them on a stone slab and rummaged in their cold capacious bellies to enhance the glory of materia medica … They were the bunk—the whole greasy lot of them!
Having temporarily finished with the autopsy, Dean Whitley’s impatient customer glowered over the titles of the big books in the case hard by … Simpson’s Nervous Diseases … the old sap. You had to read his blather in front of a dictionary; weren’t ten words in the whole fourteen pounds of wood-pulp with less than seven syllables … Mount’s Obsessions … Why was it that these bozos thought it unscholarly to be intelligible and undignified to be interesting? And as for obsessions, old Mount was a nut himself—one of these cuckoos that tapped every third telegraph pole with his cane and spat on fireplugs … If he missed one,
