“He’s dead all right, dear,” replied Bentley, his nostrils quivering with pleasure as he looked ahead at New York, while the breeze along the Hudson pushed his hair back from his forehead. “He had abused the great anthropoids for too many years. They seized their opportunity, don’t mistake that.”
“Still, he was a genius in his way, a mad, frightful genius. It hardly seems possible to me that he would allow himself to be so easily trapped. It’s a reflection on his great mentality, twisted though it was.”
“Forget it, dear,” replied Bentley, putting his arm around her shoulders. “We’ll both try to forget. After our nerves have returned to normal we’ll be married. Then nothing can trouble us.”
The vessel docked and later Lee and Ellen entered a taxicab near the pier.
“I’ll take you to your home, Ellen,” said Bentley. “Then I’ll look after my own affairs for the next couple of days, which includes making peace with my father, then we’ll go on from here.”
They looked through the windows of the cab as they rolled into lower Fifth Avenue and headed uptown. Newsies were screaming an extra from the sidewalks.
“Excitement!” said Bentley enthusiastically. “It’s certainly good to be home and hear a newsboy’s unintelligible screaming of an extra, isn’t it?”
On an impulse he ordered the cabbie to draw up to the curb and purchased a newspaper.
“Do you mind if I glance through the headlines?” Bentley asked Ellen. “I haven’t looked at an American paper for ever so long.”