Jeffrey stood upon no ceremony with him.
"Why the devil," said he, "do you talk to me as if you'd begun English yesterday? You forget I've heard you translating bunkum up on the circus-ground."
Andrea's eyes shone the more enchantingly. He was shameless, though. He took nothing back, and even offered Jeffrey an enormous pineapple, with the air of wanting to show his good-will and expecting it to be received with an equal open-heartedness. Jeffrey walked away with the pineapple, beaten, and reflecting soberly, his brow tightened into a knot. Things were going on just outside his horizon, and he wasn't to know. Who did know? Madame Beattie, certainly. The old witch was at the bottom of it. She had, for purposes of her own, wound the foreign population round her finger, and she was going to unwind them when the time came to spin a web. A web of many colours, he knew it would be, doubtless strong in some spots and snarled in others. Madame Beattie was not the person to spin a web of ordinary life.
He went on in his blue working clothes, absently taking off his hat to the ladies he met who looked inquiringly at him and then quite eagerly bowed. Jeff was impatient of these recognitions. The ladies were even too gracious. They were anxious to stand by him in the old Addington way, and as for him, he wanted chiefly to hoe his corn and live unseen. But his feet did not take him home. They led him down the street and up the stairs into Alston Choate's office, and there, hugging his pineapple, he entered, and found Alston sitting by the window in the afternoon light, his feet on a chair and a novel in his hand. This back window of the office looked down over the river, and beyond a line of willows to peaceful flats, and now the low sun was touching up the scene with afternoon peace. Alston, at sight of him, took his legs down promptly. He, too, was more eager in welcome because Jeffrey was a marked figure, and went so seldom up other men's stairs. Alston threw his book on the table, and Jeffrey set his pineapple beside it.
"There's a breeze over here," said Alston, and they took chairs by the window.
For a minute Jeffrey looked out over the low-lying scene. He drew a quick breath. This was the first time he had overlooked the old playground since he had left Addington for his grown-up life.
"We used to sail the old scow down there," he said. "Remember?"
Choate nodded.
"She's down there now in one of the yards, filled with red geraniums."
They sat for a while in the silence of men who find it unexpectedly restful to be together and need not even say so. Yet they were not here at all. They were boys of Addington, trotting along side by side in the inherited games of Addington. Alston offered Jeffrey a smoke, and Jeff refused it.