"Not even wings?"
"We are forging them together."
Hearty delights these hours with the vibrant girl always were; but they were not as heady and intoxicating as he had imagined love would be. Perhaps too heady, in another sense; there was a lack somewhere, he meditated ruefully, as his car picked its way past the guarded entrances to the entrenched mountain. A prodigal son, he had called himself; but this was one of those itching hours when he envied the erotic mire of the earlier vagrant. His body hungered morbidly for the barely sampled flesh pots of the Meade bungalow, the perilous soilure of Butler's Avenue.
Night's dead peacefulness was the only reality. The moon froze ramp building and sagging shack into silver immobility; there could be no hour when bleeding forms lurched and died on this eternal background. Day's conflicts were shadowy impossibility; he could not take further part in the fantastic strife that meant death and suffering; he was caught in the midnight spell of the silent world.
But a gush of warm-blooded hatred welled over him—hatred that turned this silver heaven into an iron-red hell. No; he was pledged fighter in the cause of the mountain that must be all men's. He was vaguely aware that this reborn fealty came from two mothering, radiant eyes, that watched his steps in light and darkness, and waited with shadowy arms to welcome him at war's end.
The morning's headlines obtruded on Paul Judson's attention, at his usual early breakfast. They caused no lightening of his accustomed frown. Uncertainly he fumed around the place. When he saw Pelham about to start for the city, he walked over and intercepted him.
"Your car woke us up at three last night."
"It was shortly after two when I got here."
"You'll agree with me that such hours are a bad influence on the boys. Your mother and I go to bed at ten. I can't have it."
Pelham did not answer, an ugly surge of anger up-boiling within him.