His uncle looked at him with a grim smile, and answered nothing. The subject was dropped for the time being, and Tommy went to live at his uncle’s hotel, to make up his mind about his very important future. He lived a wretched sort of life, forever hanging about the lobby, or sitting through vaudeville shows and musical comedies. He ate breakfast with his exasperated old uncle every morning, and dinner almost every evening.
There was something peculiarly and intolerably irritating about Tommy—some quality which, in spite of his invariable good temper and his ingratiating manners, infuriated his uncle. A perfect young ass, the old lawyer called him.
Why was it that the qualities which would have been so endearing in a girl of eighteen were so maddening in Tommy? Why was he, with his youth, his boundless good will,[Pg 28] his plaintive innocence, really nothing on earth but a young ass?
He was a great lanky boy with a naïve, good-humored face and a preposterous foppish air, a man-of-the-world air; wearing clothes ostentatiously correct and an amazing eyeglass with a broad black ribbon. He imagined that he looked like a foreign diplomat, while at the bottom of his heart he was quite conscious of being and looking a puppy. He swaggered, but without any self-assurance.
He devoted great thought to his clothes, and he could not refrain from mentioning his sartorial inventions and improvements to his uncle.
“What do you think of the cut of this coat?” he would ask. “Do you notice this shoulder? Rather good, eh?”
“Beautiful!” his uncle would say. “I never saw such grace and elegance—a regular Beau Brummel! You’re fascinating. There’s nothing that interests me like the cut of your coats!”
Then Tommy would open the evening paper and laugh loudly and ostentatiously at something in it, to show how undisturbed he was.
“Why don’t you go out?” the old gentleman used to ask, often and often, when, their dinner finished, they went up together in the lift to the little sitting room they shared. “What’s the matter with you, Thomas? A boy of your age, sitting at home here with an old fellow like me, night after night! Why don’t you go out somewhere and enjoy yourself? Haven’t you any friends?”
Well, he hadn’t. All the boys he had known and liked in the military academy up the Hudson had come from the farthest ends of the country—from Texas, from California, from Maine. He had never been particularly popular, anyhow, and he was too shy and too ridiculous to make friends now.