“Look, Lary, those birds! They’re fighting!”
The woman seized his arm and whirled him about. They were nearing the end of the campus walk, where the maples cast slow-dancing shadows on the hard gravel. Larimore Trench almost lost his footing, as the pebbles scurried across the grass. He looked at his companion in astonishment. She was not one to go off her head at trifles, yet her tone revealed genuine alarm. In the grass, not ten feet away, two chesty robins were battling like miniature game cocks, their cries denoting a grotesque kind of rage.
“La femme in the case is over there on that syringa,” Lary told her, “estimating the prospects for the posterity she expects to mother. I have never been satisfied with the age I have to live in. But I’m glad I wasn’t born a troglodyte, in a world crying for population.”
As he spoke, his back to the street, Hal and Eileen whisked by in their car and disappeared around the corner. The two watched the birds a moment. Then they resumed their walk. The easy confidence that had grown, quite unnoticed, between them was interrupted. Strive as they would they could find no common ground. Judith was vexed with Eileen. Why should she come along, with her crashing discord, at just that moment? And again, why did it matter whether she and Larimore Trench had a pleasant walk or a sullen one? They had long since discussed every problem under the sun—and had found all of them hopelessly old. As they turned from Grant Drive and were entering Roosevelt Place, she paused to lay an arresting hand on his arm.
“Lary, there are three houses here under construction. The one near the middle of the block is yours. You haven’t even a bowing acquaintance with the other two.”
The man—not the architect—flushed with pleasure. He had never talked shop to Mrs. Ascott, and her recognition of one of his ideas, simply rendered in rough concrete and blue-green tile, pleased him. She would help him to compromise with Mrs. Morton about that inglenook. But the inglenook was only a subterfuge. He wanted to talk to her about his sister. She alone could make Eileen see that her admirer was uncouth, a good-looking animal devoid of a single quality to survive the honeymoon.
III
As they picked their way cautiously between paint cans and piles of building refuse, Lary discovered that the workmen had erected a barricade between the front hall and the living-room, and the angle of the stairway shut the chimney corner from view. On the second floor there was another obstacle. The floors had been newly waxed, and a stern “Verboten” flaunted its impotent arrogance in their path. They continued their climb to the third floor, where children, servants, billiards, and winter garments would be harboured. Judith paused in the door to the nursery, crossed the room and sank, exhausted, in the wide window seat. Lary found place beside her, as he told her of the clever girl who had done the Peter Pan frieze above the yellow painted wall.
“Are you fond of children, Lary?” She was thinking of Eileen.
“No, I detest them.”