Page 200 - 401_

199

His voice broke, and he went hurriedly out. Back in the salon
he was pouring himself a drink with uneasy fingers, when the front
door opened suddenly, and his cousin came in.
"Why, Anson, I hear Dolly's sick," she began solicitously. "I
hear she's sick...."
"It was nothing," he interrupted, raising his voice so that it
would carry into Dolly's room. "She was a little tired. She went to
bed."
For a long time afterward Anson believed that a protective God
sometimes interfered in human affairs. But Dolly Karger, lying awake
and staring at the ceiling, never again believed in anything at all.
VI
When Dolly married during the following autumn, Anson was
in London on business. Like Paula's marriage, it was sudden, but it
affected him in a different way. At first he felt that it was funny, and
had an inclination to laugh when he thought of it. Later it depressed
him – it made him feel old.
There was something repetitive about it – why, Paula and Dolly
had belonged to different generations. He had a foretaste of the
sensation of a man of forty who hears that the daughter of an old
flame has married. He wired congratulations and, as was not the case
with Paula, they were sincere – he had never really hoped that Paula
would be happy.
When he returned to New York, he was made a partner in the
firm, and, as his responsibilities increased, he had less time on his
hands. The refusal of a life-insurance company to issue him a policy
made such an impression on him that he stopped drinking for a year,
and claimed that he felt better physically, though I think he missed
the convivial recounting of those Celliniesque adventures which, in
his early twenties, had played such a part in his life. But he never
abandoned the Vale Club. He was a figure there, a personality, and
the tendency of his class, who were now seven years out of college, to
drift away to more sober haunts was checked by his presence.
His day was never too full nor his mind too weary to give any
sort of aid to any one who asked it. What had been done at first
through pride and superiority had become a habit and a passion. And
there was always something – a younger brother in trouble at New
Haven, a quarrel to be patched up between a friend and his wife, a