3
“What!” The exclamation came in a tone of utter incredulous astonishment from the girl at his side, who sat there, rigid, as though frozen by that news.
“Yes, I tell you!” he cried. “We’ve—busted up everything—for good and all.”
And feeling himself uncontrollably about to cry, he turned his face against the couch, and lay shaken with convulsive strangling sobs.
The girl sprang up, and looked down at him. She had never seen him cry. She had not known that he could cry. As a matter of fact, he had not cried very many times in his life, and he did not know how, and did it badly.
He looked up at last, brushing his eyes with his coatsleeve. He wanted her pity.
He saw her looking at him with haughty anger. Her whole gesture was one of outrage. When she saw him look up, she clenched her fists, and said,
“You never told me—”
“Never told you?” His anger burst out against her, anger mixed with self-pity. “What did you expect?”
She turned half away from him in disdain.
“Not this!” she said.
“No!” he said, sitting up. “No, you little idiot, I suppose you didn’t.... And I didn’t either. Well—you see.”
She looked back over her shoulder with repugnance, as if she were looking at something sick, wounded, or diseased.
“Yes,” she said doubtfully, “I see....”
She turned back to him, her hostility gone, and a mournful look in her eyes.
“I never supposed,” she said haltingly, “that you—”
She paused, and then went on,
“—You too—”
Under her glance he straightened up, ashamed of himself. He rose. He must, he supposed, have looked silly....
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“I’m sorry too—Felix,” she answered, and there was in her tone the quality of a farewell.
There was something bracing at this moment in her scornful silence as she let him walk out of the room.... He went to the bathroom and washed his face; looked at himself in the mirror: was the face he saw there the one that had been twisted in grotesque sobbing a few minutes ago? No one would have guessed it.... He looked hard at that face, for some sign of weakness. But it seemed to him that the weakness had been burned out of it by the fire of a girl’s scorn. It was a face indifferent and aloof from sorrow, with amused eyes and jauntily smiling mouth. Yes, that was Felix Fay as he should be.
He went back to his room, tossed his Roget’s Thesaurus and his favourite penholder into the wastebasket with the torn manuscripts, put on his hat—and then noticed his stick in the corner.
He picked it up, hung it over his arm, turned out the gas, and went out whistling.
Book Six
Wilson Avenue