"I won't promise you anything!" she burst out. Then her face altered. The defiant little line of her mouth bent and her strength seemed to run out at each end of that pathetic curve. "Yes, I will," she said. "I suppose that's fair. I couldn't tell Mr. Mifflin, anyway. I'd be ashamed to tell him how you frightened me. I think you're hateful. I came over here thinking I was going to have such a good time, and you've spoilt it all!"
For one terrible moment he thought she was going to cry. But he remembered having seen heroines cry in the movies, and knew it was only done when there was a table and chair handy.
"Miss Chapman," he said, "I'm as sorry as a man can be. But I swear I did what I did in all honesty. If I'm wrong in this, you need never speak to me again. If I'm wrong, you—you can tell your father to take his advertising away from the Grey-Matter Company. I can't say more than that."
And, to do him justice, he couldn't. It was the supreme sacrifice.
She let him out of the front door without another word.
Chapter XII
Aubrey Determines to give Service that's Different
Seldom has a young man spent a more desolate afternoon than Aubrey on that Sunday. His only consolation was that twenty minutes after he had left the bookshop he saw a taxi drive up (he was then sitting gloomily at his bedroom window) and Titania enter it and drive away. He supposed that she had gone to join the party in Larchmont, and was glad to know that she was out of what he now called the war zone. For the first time on record, O. Henry failed to solace him. His pipe tasted bitter and brackish. He was eager to know what Weintraub was doing, but did not dare make any investigations in broad daylight. His idea was to wait until dark. Observing the Sabbath calm of the streets, and the pageant of baby carriages wheeling toward Thackeray Boulevard, he wondered again whether he had thrown away this girl's friendship for a merely imaginary suspicion.
At last he could endure his cramped bedroom no longer. Downstairs someone was dolefully playing a flute, most horrible of all tortures to tightened nerves. While her lodgers were at church the tireless Mrs. Schiller was doing a little housecleaning: he could hear the monotonous rasp of a carpet-sweeper passing back and forth in an adjoining room. He creaked irritably downstairs, and heard the usual splashing behind the bathroom door. In the frame of the hall mirror he saw a pencilled note: Will Mrs. Smith please call Tarkington 1565, it said. Unreasonably annoyed, he tore a piece of paper out of his notebook and wrote on it Will Mrs. Smith please call Bath 4200. Mounting to the second floor he tapped on the bathroom door. "Don't come in!" cried an agitated female voice. He thrust the memorandum under the door, and left the house.