“Who?” Stacey returned. “Who but Irene?”
Julie giggled. “Wh-what in the world has Irene done to you?” she demanded.
He sat up straight and gazed at his sister. “Jul-ia,” he said, “you know me to be modest, you know how little I esteem my personal charm, caring more for simple things such as goodness and—”
“Oh, yes,” Julie interrupted, “I know all that! I want to hear about Irene.”
“Therefore,” he continued, “when, from never having seen the lady at all, I began to see her almost daily, and, when I didn’t see her, to get invitations to functions given by her or functions at which she was to be present, it was long before I suspected purpose in all this. But, Julie, though modest I am not a fool. Things have now reached such a point that I cannot take a walk in the park or motor anywhere without meeting Irene. And I tell you there is evil design in all this, and I’m going away.” Julie was giggling increasingly. “Only five minutes ago I evaded her—but not for long. My senses are growing as abnormally acute as those of Roderick Usher in Poe’s story.” He paused and listened apprehensively. “And, in his words, ‘I tell you that she now stands without the door!’ ”
At this moment the door bell did, indeed, ring. Stacey sprang up.
“You see? Good-bye, Julie! I’m going out the back way,” he concluded, and fled.
As for Julie, she threw herself down on the davenport and laughed helplessly, in which position Irene presently found her.
No one seeing Stacey with his sister could have reconciled him with the Stacey who set himself against society and flew into passions at his impotence to destroy. Yet there was no pose in his attitude toward her. Pose demands a marked consciousness of self, and this he was assuredly without. He behaved in that way because he felt that way when he was with Julie, which was not so very often; and he was obscurely grateful to her for making him feel so. He liked his sister better than in the old days. She had an ingenuous manner that concealed a rich sense of humor, and he was inclined to think that this was characteristic of her attitude toward all things, that, though her surface simplicity was unassumed, beneath it lay, not indeed a deliberate philosophy, but a mature apprehension of life. But he did not waste much thought on analysis of Julie; he accepted her as a pleasant fact.
Stacey, then, set off for New York the next afternoon. Julie was at the train to bid him good-bye, and so was Jimmy Prout, who tossed a book into his brother-in-law’s lap, and sat down opposite him. Stacey considered Jimmy’s agreeable face. Jimmy did no one any harm; on the contrary, he did people good by being such a companionable person. Why, thought Stacey, couldn’t he be like Jimmy? If turbulence of mind solved anything, got one anywhere, there would be something to say for it; since it didn’t, since it led only to impotent fuming, what was the use of it? But, even at the moment of putting the question to himself, Stacey was disconsolately aware that he might as well ask what was the use of the tides, since they only moved back and forth.