"Here I am, thirty-two. Suppose I did start in at some idiotic business. Perhaps in two years I might rise to fifty dollars a week--with luck. That's _if_ I could get a job at all; there's an awful lot of unemployment. Well, suppose I made fifty a week. Do you think I'd be any happier? Do you think that if I don't get this money of my grandfather's life will be _endurable?_"
Muriel smiled complacently.
"Well," she said, "that may be clever but it isn't common sense."
A few minutes later Gloria came in seeming to bring with her into the room some dark color, indeterminate and rare. In a taciturn way she was happy to see Muriel. She greeted Anthony with a casual "Hi!"
"I've been talking philosophy with your husband," cried the irrepressible Miss Kane.
"We took up some fundamental concepts," said Anthony, a faint smile disturbing his pale cheeks, paler still under two days' growth of beard.
Oblivious to his irony Muriel rehashed her contention. When she had done, Gloria said quietly: "Anthony's right. It's no fun to go around when you have the sense that people are looking at you in a certain way."
He broke in plaintively: "Don't you think that when even Maury Noble, who was my best friend, won't come to see us it's high time to stop calling people up?" Tears were standing in his eyes.
"That was your fault about Maury Noble," said Gloria coolly.
"It wasn't."
"It most certainly was."
Muriel intervened quickly: "I met a girl who knew Maury, the other day, and she says he doesn't drink any more. He's getting pretty cagey."
"Doesn't?"
"Practically not at all. He's making _piles_ of money. He's sort of changed since the war. He's going to marry a girl in Philadelphia who has millions, Ceci Larrabee--anyhow, that's what Town Tattle said."
"He's thirty-three," said Anthony, thinking aloud. But it's odd to imagine his getting married. I used to think he was so brilliant."
"He was," murmured Gloria, "in a way."
"But brilliant people don't settle down in business--or do they? Or what do they do? Or what becomes of everybody you used to know and have so much in common with?"
"You drift apart," suggested Muriel with the appropriate dreamy look.
"They change," said Gloria. "All the qualities that they don't use in their daily lives get cobwebbed up."
"The last thing he said to me," recollected Anthony, "was that he was going to work so as to forget that there was nothing worth working for."
Muriel caught at this quickly.
"That's what you ought to do," she exclaimed triumphantly. "Of course I shouldn't think anybody would want to work for nothing. But it'd give you something to do. What do you do with yourselves, anyway? Nobody ever sees you at Montmartre or--or anywhere. Are you economizing?"