He brought himself up sharply. He had allowed his imagination to run
away with him. He had been depicting a flight and no one who knew David
could imagine him in flight.
Nevertheless he was conscious of a new uneasiness and anxiety. When
David recovered sufficiently he would go to Norada, as he had told
Elizabeth, and there he would find the Donaldsons, and clear up the
things that bothered him. After that-He thought of Elizabeth, of her sweetness and sanity. He remembered her
at the theater the evening before, lost in its fictitious emotions, its
counterfeit drama. He had felt moved to comfort her, when he found her
on the verge of tears.
"Just remember, they're only acting," he had said.
"Yes. But life does do things like that to people."
"Not often. The theater deals in the dramatic exceptions to life. You
and I, plain bread and butter people, come to see these things because
we get a sort of vicarious thrill out of them."
"Doesn't anything ever happen to the plain bread and butter people?"
"A little jam, sometimes. Or perhaps they drop it, butter side down, on
the carpet."
"But that is tragedy, isn't it?"
He had had to acknowledge that it might be. But he had been quite
emphatic over the fact that most people didn't drop it.
After a long time he slept in his chair. The spring wind came in through
the opened window, and fluttered the leaves of the old prayer-book on
the stand.