"Oh! Oh, how are you?"
"Why, why I'm--I've got settled. I can get into the engineering school
all right."
"I'm glad."
"Uh, enjoying Seattle?"
"Oh! Oh yes. The mountains---- Do you like it?"
"Oh! Oh yes. Sea and all---- Great town."
"Uh, w-when are we going to see you? Daddy had to go East, left you his
regards. W-when----?"
"Why--why I suppose you're awful--awfully busy, meeting people and
all----"
"Yes, I am, rather, but----" Her hedging uncomfortable tone changed to a
cry of distress. "Milt! I must see you. Come up at four this afternoon."
"Yes!"
He rushed to a small, hot tailor-shop. He panted "Press m' suit while I
wait?" They gave him a pair of temporary trousers, an undesirable pair
of trousers belonging to a short fat man with no taste in fabrics, and
with these flapping about his lean legs, he sat behind a calico curtain,
reading The War Cry and looking at a "fashion-plate" depicting nine
gentlemen yachtsmen each nine feet tall, while the Jugoslav in charge
unfeelingly sprinkled and ironed and patted his suit.
He spent ten minutes in blacking his shoes, in his room--and twenty
minutes in getting the blacking off his fingers.
He was walking through the gate in the Gilson hedge at one minute to
four.
But he had reached Queen Anne Hill at three. For an hour he had walked
the crest road, staring at the steamers below, alternately gripping his
hands with desire of Claire, and timorously finally deciding that he
wouldn't go to her house--wouldn't ever see her again.
He came into the hall tremblingly expecting some great thing, some
rending scene, and she met him with a cool, "Oh, this is nice. Eva had
some little white cakes made for us." He felt like a man who has asked
for a drink of cold charged water and found it warm and flat.
"How---- Dandy house," he muttered, limply shaking her limp hand.
"Yes, isn't it a darling. They do themselves awfully well here. I'm
afraid your bluff, plain, democratic Westerners are a fraud. I hear a
lot more about 'society' here than I ever did in the East. The sets seem
frightfully complicated." She was drifting into the drawing-room, to a
tapestry stool, and Milt was awkwardly stalking a large wing chair,
while she fidgeted: "Everybody tells me about how one poor dear soul, a charming lady who
used to take in washing or salt gold-mines or something, and she came
here a little while ago with billions and billions of dollars, and tried
to buy her way in by shopping for all the charities in town, and
apparently she's just as out of it here as she would be in London. You
and I aren't exclusive like that, are we!"
Somehow---Her "you and I" was too kindly, as though she was trying to put him at
ease, as though she knew he couldn't possibly be at ease. With a
horribly elaborate politeness, with a smile that felt hot on his
twitching cheeks, he murmured, "Oh no. No, we---- No, I guess----"