The Spark (The 'Sixties)

OLD NEW YORK
THE SPARK ( The ’Sixties ) By EDITH WHARTON
( The ’Sixties ) BY EDITH WHARTON AUTHOR OF “THE AGE OF INNOCENCE,” ETC. DECORATIONS BY E. C. CASWELL
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY NEW YORK :: LONDON :: MCMXXIV COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY Copyright, 1924, by The Curtis Publishing Company PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA



“YOU idiot!” said his wife, and threw down her cards.
I turned my head away quickly, to avoid seeing Hayley Delane’s face; though why I wished to avoid it I could not have told you, much less why I should have imagined (if I did) that a man of his age and importance would notice what was happening to the wholly negligible features of a youth like myself.
I turned away so that he should not see how it hurt me to hear him called an idiot, even in joke—well, at least half in joke; yet I often thought him an idiot myself, and bad as my own poker was, I knew enough of the game to judge that his—when he wasn’t attending—fully justified such an outburst from his wife. Why her sally disturbed me I couldn’t have said; nor why, when it was greeted by a shrill guffaw from her “latest,” young Bolton Byrne, I itched to cuff the little bounder; nor why, when Hayley Delane, on whom banter always dawned slowly but certainly, at length gave forth his low rich gurgle of appreciation—why then, most of all, I wanted to blot the whole scene from my memory. Why?
There they sat, as I had so often seen them, in Jack Alstrop’s luxurious bookless library (I’m sure the rich rows behind the glass doors were hollow), while beyond the windows the pale twilight thickened to blue over Long Island lawns and woods and a moonlit streak of sea. No one ever looked out at that , except to conjecture what sort of weather there would be the next day for polo, or hunting, or racing, or whatever use the season required the face of nature to be put to; no one was aware of the twilight, the moon or the blue shadows—and Hayley Delane least of all. Day after day, night after night, he sat anchored at somebody’s poker-table, and fumbled absently with his cards....