When the tale was finished the older man drew a long breath. “By Jove!” he exclaimed in a low voice, mingled admiration and envy showing in his face. “To live through moments like those! Wonderful! Moments you’ll never forget!”
But Stacey, who had risen and was leaning against the empty fire-place, gave an odd sound like a strangled laugh. He crossed the room to a tall window, flung it wide open, and surreptitiously wiped a drop of perspiration from his forehead. Then he turned back.
“Make me another cocktail, dad,” he said. “Do! We couldn’t get gin like that in Italy.”
It was a relief to Stacey when Julie and her husband arrived. For he craved of his sister now precisely what had irked him in her formerly—her apparent absence of any inner life and her absorbed occupation with externals. If any one had protested that she probably did have an inner life he would have assented cheerfully. He simply did not want to know about it or about any one else’s.
The Prouts were a little late (Julie was always a little late) and Mr. Carroll, who had been fidgeting with increasing exasperation, greeted his daughter wrathfully.
“Confound it, Julie! Can’t you be on time for once in a way? Isn’t it as easy to get here at seven as at seven-ten?”
“Well, now, daddy, it wasn’t my fault,” said Julie, her voice and eyes full of hurt innocence, while her husband grinned. “I was all ready and then at the very last moment—”
“Pshaw!” her father interrupted. “If only you wouldn’t always have an excuse! Come on in! Everything will be cold, of course.”
And such things put Stacey in good humor. Indeed, among them he enjoyed himself more than later when the first two courses had been served and his father was ready for conversation.
“Poor Jimmy!” Julie was saying. “He was so unhappy not to get across! After he’d gone through officers’ training camp they sent him to Camp Grant and just kept him there the whole time. He was so mad, weren’t you, Jimmy?”