“How in the world should you?” she replied. “I don’t, either. I only feel something rather vaguely. But there is one thing clear, my dear boy. I want you to be certain that you have a sincere affectionate friend in me, who will always try her puzzled best to understand you sympathetically. And that was really all I had to say.”
“Oh, thank you!” he cried, genuinely touched.
“Now take me home,” she added. “We must go carefully around the house and I’ll let myself in at the back door so that Marian won’t know I’ve been out.” She laughed. “Think of your having an assignation with your mother-in-law and having to conceal it from her daughter!”
But when Stacey had seen Mrs. Latimer safely enter the back door of her house, and was walking home along the deserted streets, though he felt warmed and comforted by her unexpected intelligent friendship, he also felt an uneasy sense of disloyalty, as though he and she had become accomplices in a secret league against Marian.
3
Stacey arrived in New York one afternoon about a week later. His boat was to sail the next morning. He went to the small hotel on Tenth Street where he always stayed.
“How do you do, Mr. Carroll? Glad to see you, sir,” said the clerk.
Stacey wasted no time, but dropped his suitcase in his room and set off immediately up-town on the top of a motor-bus.
It was clear dry weather, not too cold, and the city’s buildings stood out sharply against a brilliant sky. Stacey had never liked this glittering hardness in the atmosphere of New York. The Metropolitan Tower wouldn’t be so bad and the Woolworth would be bully, he had often thought, if only they would soar up dimly into a softening haze, as they would in Paris. The whole show was good, but not good enough to stand this crude vivid light. Nothing could stand it—neither façades nor human faces. It was like an immense close-up at the movies. And to-day, since he continued to feel about him and within himself so much confusion, this effect of physical clarity really made him uneasy.
But the discomfort soon faded and he thought only that he was to have this whole afternoon and evening with Philip Blair. He took the stuffy elevator in the Harlem apartment house, stepped out, and hurried down the dark hall to Philip’s door with no other feeling than gladness.