Page 209 - 401_

208

broad window of one of his clubs – one that he had scarcely visited in
five years – a gray man with watery eyes stared down at him. Anson
looked quickly away – that figure sitting in vacant resignation, in
supercilious solitude, depressed him. He stopped and, retracing his
steps, started over 47th Street toward Teak Warden's apartment. Teak
and his wife had once been his most familiar friends – it was a
household where he and Dolly Karger had been used to go in the days
of their affair. But Teak had taken to drink, and his wife had
remarked publicly that Anson was a bad influence on him. The
remark reached Anson in an exaggerated form – when it was finally
cleared up, the delicate spell of intimacy was broken, never to be
renewed.
"Is Mr.. Warden at home?" he inquired.
"They've gone to the country."
The fact unexpectedly cut at him. They were gone to the
country and he hadn't known. Two years before he would have
known the date, the hour, come up at the last moment for a final
drink, and planned his first visit to them. Now they had gone without
a word.
Anson looked at his watch and considered a week-end with his
family, but the only train was a local that would jolt through the
aggressive heat for three hours. And to-morrow in the country, and
Sunday – he was in no mood for porch-bridge with polite
undergraduates, and dancing after dinner at a rural roadhouse, a
diminutive of gaiety which his father had estimated too well.
"Oh, no," he said to himself.... "No."
He was a dignified, impressive young man, rather stout now,
but otherwise unmarked by dissipation. He could have been cast for a
pillar of something – at times you were sure it was not society, at
others nothing else - for the law, for the church. He stood for a few
minutes motionless on the sidewalk in front of a 47th Street
apartment-house; for almost the first time in his life he had nothing
whatever to do.
Then he began to walk briskly up Fifth Avenue, as if he had
just been reminded of an important engagement there. The necessity
of dissimulation is one of the few characteristics that we share with
dogs, and I think of Anson on that day as some well-bred specimen
who had been disappointed at a familiar back door. He was going to
see Nick, once a fashionable bartender in demand at all private