“Why, he’s a nice young fellow,” Garnett declared. “I can’t believe he’d——”
“Neither could I,” interrupted Wharton quietly. “I thought he was a nice young fellow too. And what’s more, I rather suspected that my daughter was a pretty decent young girl.”
Garnett was astonished and annoyed. He had seen Llewellyn Clark not an hour before in the small drafting room he occupied in the Garnett & Linquist offices. He understood now why Clark wasn’t going back to Boston Tech this fall. And in the light of this revelation he remembered that there had been a change in the boy during the past month—absences, late arrivals, a certain listlessness in his work.
Mrs. Wharton’s voice broke in upon the ordering of his mind.
“Please do something, Chauncey,” she said. “Talk to him. Talk to them both. She’s only sixteen and we can’t bear to see her life ruined by a divorce. It isn’t that we care what people will say; it’s only Lucy we care about, Chauncey.”
“Why don’t you send her abroad for a year?”
Wharton shook his head.
“That doesn’t solve the problem. If they have an ounce of character between them they’ll make an attempt to live together.”
“But if you think so badly of him——”
“Lucy’s made her choice. He’s got some money—enough. And there doesn’t seem to be anything vicious in his record so far.”
“What’s his side of it?”
Wharton waved his hands helplessly.
“I’m damned if I know. Something about a hat. Some bunch of rubbish. Elsie and I have no idea why they ran away, and now we can’t get a clear idea why they won’t stick together. Unfortunately, his father and mother are dead.” He paused. “Chauncey, if you could see your way clear——”
An unpleasant prospect began to take shape before Garnett’s eyes. He was an old man with one foot, at least, in the chimney corner. From where he stood, this youngest generation was like something infinitely distant, and perceived through the large end of a telescope.
“Oh, of course,” he heard himself saying vaguely. So hard to think back to that young time. Since his youth such a myriad of prejudices and conventions had passed through the fashion show and died away with clamor and acrimony and commotion. It would be difficult even to communicate with these children. How hollowly and fatuously his platitudes would echo on their ears. And how bored he would be with their selfishness and with their shallow confidence in opinions manufactured day before yesterday.
He sat up suddenly. Wharton and his wife were gone, and a slender, dark-haired girl whose body hovered delicately on the last edge of childhood had come quietly into the room. She regarded him for a moment with a shadow of alarm in her intent brown eyes; then sat down on a stiff chair near him.
“I’m Lucy,” she said. “They told me you wanted to talk to me.”
She waited. It occurred to Garnett that he must say something, but the form his speech should take eluded him.
“I haven’t seen you since you were ten years old,” he began uneasily.
“Yes,” she agreed, with a small, polite smile.
There was another silence. He must say something to the point before her young attention slipped utterly away.
“I’m sorry you and Llewellyn have quarreled,” he broke out. “It’s silly to quarrel like that. I’m very fond of Llewellyn, you know.”
“Did he send you here?”
Garnett shook his head. “Are you—in love with him?” he inquired.
“Not any more.”
“Is he in love with you?”
“He says so, but I don’t think he is—any more.”
“You’re sorry you married him?”
“I’m never sorry for anything that’s done.”
“I see.”
Again she waited.
“Your father tells me this is a permanent separation.”
“Yes.”
“May I ask why?”
“We just couldn’t get along,” she answered simply. “I thought he was terribly selfish and he thought the same about me. We fought all the time, from almost the first day.”
“He hit you?”
“Oh, that!” She dismissed that as unimportant.
“How do you mean—selfish?”
“Just selfish,” she answered childishly. “The most selfish thing I ever saw in my life. I never saw anything so selfish in my life.”
“What did he do that was selfish?” persisted Garnett.
“Everything. He was so stingy—gosh!” Her eyes were serious and sad. “I can’t stand anybody to be so stingy—about money,” she explained contemptuously. “Then he’d lose his temper and swear at me and say he was going to leave me if I didn’t do what he wanted me to.” And she added, still very gravely, “Gosh!”
“How did he happen to hit you?”
“Oh, he didn’t mean to hit me. I was trying to hit him on account of something he did, and he was trying to hold me and so I bumped into a still.”
“A still!” exclaimed Garnett, startled.
“The woman had a still in our room because she had no other place to keep it—down on Beckton Street, where we lived.”
“Why did Llewellyn take you to such a place?”
“Oh, it was a perfectly good place except that the woman had this still. We looked around two or three days and it was the only apartment we could afford.” She paused reminiscently and then added, “It was very nice and quiet.”
“H’m—you never really got along at all?”
“No.” She hesitated. “He spoiled it all. He was always worrying about whether we’d done the right thing. He’d get out of bed at night and walk up and down worrying about it. I wasn’t complaining. I was perfectly willing to be poor if we could get along and be happy. I wanted to go to cooking school, for instance, and he wouldn’t let me. He wanted me to sit in the room all day and wait for him.”
“Why?”
“He was afraid that I wanted to go home. For three weeks it was one long quarrel from morning till night. I couldn’t stand it.”
“It seems to me that a lot of this quarreling was over nothing,” ventured Garnett.
“I haven’t explained it very well, I guess,” she said with sudden weariness. “I knew a lot of it was silly and so did Llewellyn. Sometimes we’d apologize to each other, and be in love like we were before we were married. That’s why I went back to him. But it wasn’t any use.” She stood up. “What’s the good of talking about it any more? You wouldn’t understand.”
Garnett wondered if he could get back to his office before Llewellyn Clark went home. He could talk to Clark, while the girl only confused him as she teetered disconcertingly between adolescence and disillusion. But when Clark reported to him just as the five o’clock bell rang, the same sensation of impotence stole over Garnett, and he stared at his apprentice blankly for a moment, as if he had never seen him before.
Llewellyn Clark looked older than his twenty years—a tall, almost thin, young