The Breaking Point - Page 244/275

"She's a nice kid," he said. "I'm fond of her. And I don't know what to

do."

Suddenly Joe grinned.

"I see," he said. "And you can't tell her, or the family, where you saw

him!"

"Not without raising the deuce of a row."

He began, automatically, to dress for dinner. Joe moved around the room,

rang for a waiter, ordered orange juice and ice, and produced a bottle

of gin from his bag. Leslie did not hear him, nor the later preparation

of the cocktails. He was reflecting bitterly on the fact that a man who

married built himself a wall against romance, a wall, compounded of his

own new sense of responsibility, of family ties, and fear.

Joe brought him a cocktail.

"Drink it, old dear," he said. "And when it's down I'll tell you a few

little things about playing around with ladies who have a past. Here's

to forgetting 'em."

Leslie took the glass.

"Right-o," he said.

He went home the following day, leaving Joe to finish the business in

New York. His going rather resembled a flight. Tossing sleepless the

night before, he had found what many a man had discovered before him,

that his love of clandestine adventure was not as strong as his caution.

He had had a shock. True, his affair with Beverly had been a formless

thing, a matter of imagination and a desire to assure himself that

romance, for him, was not yet dead. True, too, that he had nothing to

fear from Dick Livingstone. But the encounter had brought home to him

the danger of this old-new game he was playing. He was running like a

frightened child.

He thought of various plans. One of them was to tell Nina the truth,

take his medicine of tears and coldness, and then go to Mr. Wheeler.

One was to go to Mr. Wheeler, without Nina, and make his humiliating

admission. But Walter Wheeler had his own rigid ideas, was

uncompromising in rectitude, and would understand as only a man could

that while so far he had been only mentally unfaithful, he had been

actuated by at least subconscious desire.

His own awareness of that fact made him more cautious than he need have

been, perhaps more self-conscious. And he genuinely cared for Elizabeth.

It was, on the whole, a generous and kindly impulse that lay behind his

ultimate resolution to tell her that her desertion was both wilful and

cruel.

Yet, when the time came, he found it hard to tell her. He took her for

a drive one evening soon after his return, forcibly driving off Wallie

Sayre to do so, and eying surreptitiously now and then her pale, rather

set face. He found a quiet lane and stopped the car there, and then

turned and faced her.