Mr. Carroll fairly snorted. “Stacey, I’m ashamed of you!” he cried. “Blair can’t live in a hovel like that. He can’t surround his children with all that coal-dust and noise.”
“I give you my word, Mr. Carroll,” Phil protested, “that it’s a lot better than where we’ve been living. I really like the place. I can run a lawn-mower in the evening.”
But the older man shook his head impatiently. “Now look here!” he said. “This house of mine is three times too big for Stacey and me, especially since Julie married. You bring your wife and children here to live—anyway until you can find something really decent or build if you decide to stay.”
Philip Blair flushed slightly. “I never heard of anything quite so generous as that, sir,” he replied, a trifle unsteadily, “but I can’t possibly accept.” And there was a gentle decision in his voice.
“Well, well, well! I’d have been glad to have you,” said Mr. Carroll, and dropped the subject.
Stacey recognized that his father’s offer was more than ordinarily generous, especially since Mr. Carroll liked to lead his own life. And he would have lived up to it, Stacey knew. He would have tried to crush Phil’s opinions into the mold of his own and he would certainly have been cross if Phil or Catherine were late at meals or showed Bolshevik leanings, but in his own way, and with externals, he would have been both impetuously and consistently generous. He would probably even have given Phil a key to the wine-cellar. All this Stacey understood, and with it his father. But his understanding was intellectual. He should have felt a warm glow, but he did not. The only emotion he felt was a faint sadness at feeling nothing. “Dead!” he muttered to himself. “Dead as they make ’em!”
Yet he would not really have chosen to feel.
At coffee time a friend of Mr. Carroll’s dropped in to play pinochle, and Phil and Stacey went upstairs.
But Stacey was restless. He wanted to see Marian and resented the desire—another bond that he could not shake free of. Moreover, he knew that in Marian’s presence he should dislike her. So the endurance of the desire was doubly exasperating. All this lack of harmony—even of common sense!
“I think I’ll go over to see Marian Latimer,” he said at last to Phil. “Be glad to have you come along. Really, you know.”