"Why you darned fool, I just cleaned up twenty-five thousand on it, that's all. My God, why——"
Henry put it out of his mind, grimly. He told himself he had done the right thing. Sometimes Henry Kemp thought of his insurance. He carried a big insurance. When he died it would amount to a tidy fortune for Belle and Charley. But it had to be kept up. It was all clear now but it had to be kept up.... He put that thought out of his mind. An ugly thought.
Ben was just as good a sport about small stakes as he was about big ones. He made a bet with Charley, for example. He seemed so certainly on the losing side that Charley said, "But I won't bet on that. I'm sure of it. You haven't a sporting chance."
"Oh, haven't I! That's what everybody thinks before the other fellow wins. I'm just as sure as you are. I'm so sure that I'll bet you a pair of gloves to a set of dice. What size do you wear? Understand, I'm only asking to observe the formalities, that's all. I'm safe." He laughed a fat chuckling laugh and took Charley's slim strong young fingers in his own pulpy clasp. Charley was surprised to find herself snatching her hand away, hotly. She hadn't meant to. It was purely involuntary. The reaction against something distasteful. She won the bet. He sent her half a dozen pairs of finest French glacé gloves. Charley fingered them, thoughtfully. There was nothing pleased about her expression. She was not a fool, Charley. But she told herself that she was; poo-pood'd the idea that was growing in her mind. But now, steadily, when he called at the house, telephoned, wrote, sent flowers or candy she was out; did not answer; ignored the gifts. He found out that she and her mother had arranged to meet at a tea-room for lunch during Charley's noon hour one day, intercepted them, carried them off almost bodily to the Blackstone. There, in the rich splendour of the rose-and-cream dining room looking out upon the boulevard and the lake beyond, he was in his element. A table by the window—the centre window. Well, Maurice, what have you got out of season, h'm? Lobster? Japanese persimmons? Artichokes? Corn on the cob? He remembered that Charley had once said she adored Lobster Thermidor as the Blackstone chef prepared it. "But none of your little crab-sized lobsters now, Maurice! This young lady may be a baby vamp but she doesn't want your little measly baby lobster, remember. A good big one. And hot. And plenty of sauce.... Now then, Mrs. Kemp. How about you?"
Charley ate two bites of the big succulent crustacean and left the rest disdainfully as a reproach and a punishment for him. She talked little, and then of Lottie. Her manner was frigid, remote, baffling. A baby vamp—she, Charley Kemp! who loathed cheapness, and bobbed hair, and wriggling ways, and the whole new breed of her contemporaries who were of the hard-drinking, stairway kissing, country-club petting class. She thought of Jesse, looked out across the broad avenue to the great blue expanse of lake as though it were in reality the ocean that lay between them; and left her sweet untouched on her plate.
Mrs. Kemp did not speak to Charley of Ben Gartz's insistent attentions. Probably she did not even admit to herself the meaning of them, at first. But there is no doubt that she began, perhaps unconsciously, a process of slow poisoning.
"They all say this will go on for years. There won't be a young man left in the world—nor a middle-aged man, for that matter. Nothing but old men and children. Look at France, and Poland, and Germany! I don't know what the women are going to do."
"Do?" queried Charley, maliciously; she knew perfectly well what her mother meant.
"Do for husbands. Girls must marry, you know."
"I don't see the necessity," said Charley, coolly. (Charley, who stretched out her arms in the dark.)