"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.