He was grim. He could do it now, if he got it over quickly. “Madeline! Brought you two together because—Don’t know whether you cotton to each other or not, but I wish you could, because I’ve—I’m not making any excuses for myself. I couldn’t help it. I’m engaged to both of you, and I want to know—”
Madeline had sprung up. She had never looked quite so proud and fine. She stared at them, and walked away, wordless. She came back, she touched Leora’s shoulder, and quietly kissed her. “Dear, I’m sorry for you. You’ve got a job! You poor baby!” She strode away, her shoulders straight.
Hunched, frightened, Martin could not look at Leora.
He felt her hand on his. He looked up. She was smiling, easy, a little mocking. “Sandy, I warn you that I’m never going to give you up. I suppose you’re as bad as She says; I suppose I’m foolish—I’m a hussy. But you’re mine! I warn you it isn’t a bit of use your getting engaged to somebody else again. I’d tear her eyes out! Now don’t think so well of yourself! I guess you’re pretty selfish. But I don’t care. You’re mine!”
He said brokenly many things beautiful in their commonness.
She pondered, “I do feel we’re nearer together than you and Her. Perhaps you like me better because you can bully me—because I tag after you and She never would. And I know your work is more important to you than I am, maybe more important than you are. But I am stupid and ordinary and She isn’t. I simply admire you frightfully (Heaven knows why, but I do), while She has sense enough to make you admire Her and tag after Her.”
“No! I swear it isn’t because I can bully you, Leora—I swear it isn’t—I don’t think it is. Dearest, don’t don’t think she’s brighter than you are. She’s glib but—Oh, let’s stop talking! I’ve found you! My life’s begun!”
Chapter VII
I
The difference between Martin’s relations to Madeline and to Leora was the difference between a rousing duel and a serene comradeship. From their first evening, Leora and he depended on each other’s loyalty and liking, and certain things in his existence were settled forever. Yet his absorption in her was not stagnant. He was always making discoveries about the observations of life which she kept incubating in her secret little head while she made smoke rings with her cigarettes and smiled silently. He longed for the girl Leora; she stirred him, and with gay frank passion she answered him; but to another, sexless Leora he talked more honestly than to Gottlieb or his own worried self, while with her boyish nod or an occasional word she encouraged him to confidence in his evolving ambition and disdains.
II
Digamma Pi fraternity was giving a dance. It was understood among the anxiously whispering medics that so cosmopolitan was the University of Winnemac becoming that they were expected to wear the symbols of respectability known as “dress-suits.” On the solitary and nervous occasion when Martin had worn evening clothes he had rented them from the Varsity Pantorium, but he must own them, now that he was going to introduce Leora to the world as his pride and flowering. Like two little old people, absorbed in each other and diffidently exploring new, unwelcoming streets of the city where their alienated children live, Martin and Leora edged into the garnished magnificence of Benson, Hanley and Koch’s, the loftiest department store in Zenith. She was intimidated by the luminous cases of mahogany and plate glass, by the opera hats and lustrous mufflers and creamy riding breeches. When he had tried on a dinner suit and come out for her approval, his long brown tie and soft-collared shirt somewhat rustic behind the low evening waistcoat, and when the clerk had gone to fetch collars, she wailed:
“Darn it, Sandy, you’re too grand for me. I just simply can’t get myself to fuss over my clothes, and here you’re going to go and look so spiffy I won’t have a chance with you.”
He almost kissed her.
The clerk, returning, warbled, “I think, Modom, you’ll find that your husband will look vurry nice indeed in these wing collars.”
Then, while the clerk sought ties, he did kiss her, and she sighed:
“Oh, gee, you’re one of these people that get ahead. I never thought I’d have to live up to a man with a dress-suit and a come-to-Heaven collar. Oh, well, I’ll tag!”
III
For the Digamma Ball, the University Armory was extremely decorated. The brick walls were dizzy with bunting, spotty with paper chrysanthemums and plaster skulls and wooden scalpels ten feet long.
In six years at Mohalis, Martin had gone to less than a score of dances, though the refined titillations of communal embracing were the chief delight of the co-educational university. When he arrived at the Armory, with Leora timorously brave in a blue crepe de chine made in no recognized style, he did not care whether he had a single two-step, though he did achingly desire to have the men crowd in and ask Leora, admire her and make her welcome. Yet he was too proud to introduce her about, lest he seem to be begging his friends to dance with her. They stood alone, under the balcony, disconsolately facing the vastness of the floor, while beyond them flashed the current of dancers, beautiful, formidable, desirable. Leora and he had assured each other that, for a student affair, dinner jacket and black waistcoat would be the thing, as stated in the Benson, Hanley and Koch Chart of Correct Gents’ Wearing Apparel, but he grew miserable at the sight of voluptuous white waistcoats, and when that embryo famous surgeon, Angus Duer, came by, disdainful as a greyhound and pushing on white gloves (which are the whitest, the most superciliously white objects on earth), then Martin felt himself a hobbledehoy.
“Come on, we’ll dance,” he said, as though it were a defiance to all Angus Duers.
He very much wanted to go home.
He did not enjoy the dance, though she waltzed easily and himself not too badly. He did not even enjoy having her in his arms. He could not believe that she was in his arms. As they revolved he saw Duer join a brilliance of pretty girls and distinguished-looking women about the great Dr. Silva, dean of the medical school. Angus seemed appallingly at home, and he waltzed off with the prettiest girl, sliding, swinging, deft. Martin tried to hate him as a fool, but he remembered that yesterday Angus had been elected to the honorary society of Sigma Xi.
Leora and he crept back to the exact spot beneath the balcony where they had stood before, to their den, their one safe refuge. While he tried to be nonchalant and talk up to his new clothes, he was cursing the men he saw go by laughing with girls, ignoring his Leora.
“Not many here yet,” he fussed. “Pretty soon they’ll all be coming, and then you’ll have lots of dances.”
“Oh, I don’t mind.”
(“God, won’t somebody come and ask the poor kid?”)
He fretted over his lack of popularity among the dancing-men of the medical school. He wished Clif Clawson were present—Clif liked any sort of assembly, but he could not afford dress-clothes. Then, rejoicing as at sight of the best-beloved, he saw Irving Watters, that paragon of professional normality, wandering toward them, but Watters passed by, merely nodding. Thrice Martin hoped and desponded, and now all his pride was gone. If Leora could be happy—
“I wouldn’t care a hoot if she fell for the gabbiest fusser in the whole U., and gave me the go-by all evening. Anything to let her have a good time! If I could coax Duer over—No, that’s one thing I couldn’t stand: crawling to that dirty snob—I will!”
Up ambled Fatty Pfaff, just arrived. Martin pounced on him lovingly. “H’lo, old Fat! You a stag tonight? Meet my friend Miss Tozer.”
Fatty’s bulbous eyes showed approval of Leora’s cheeks and amber