Brenda gave the Greek god and his goddess barely a glance, before looking beyond them to the sea which was their background.
“Perhaps it’s obvious,” she responded. “Too obvious to be true. Some things are, you know.”
Chapter XXVII
Late afternoon. Glenn walked up the avenue at Wild Acres, back from the first day of his job on the World. It had been a long day, beginning at seven in the morning. He looked and was weary and disheartened, and his mouth was set in a rather bitter line. Anne, lying in a long chair in the square garden, the only patch of ground, except for a bit of lawn, which was cultivated at Wild Acres, saw him through the screen of hedge which protected her privacy, and sat up. “Glenn,” she called softly, “oh, Glenn!”
He responded to the call dispiritedly enough, but came around the hedge and sat down on the foot of her chair when she had moved her legs to make room for him. She handed him a cigarette and then held a match for him. She herself had been smoking for hours, it seemed, for the grass all around her chair was littered with cigarette stubs thrown carelessly down.
“How goes it?” she asked.
He hesitated, then looked at her gloomily. “Have you seen the morning papers?” he asked.
“Yes. The Times. But there’s hope for him, it seems. And it may have been only—only a temporary aberration. I’m upset too, Glenn. But there’s nothing we can do. Or will you try to see him?”
Brother and sister looked startlingly alike in their anxiety and disillusionment. There were deep rings under their eyes and the general pinched and worn look that can come, even to the very young, from a long day of anguish. The morning papers on their front pages had carried a blatantly headlined story of the attempted suicide in New York the night before of the young novelist, Prescott Enderly. Failure in getting his degree at Yale was the suggested cause, but there were added some pointed hints at a love affair with an “older woman.” And Glenn had been assigned to write a more detailed story for the evening edition of his paper, because he had known Enderly at Yale.
“Adams sent me to the hospital to get the latest on it,” he told Anne. “They wouldn’t let me see him. He’s delirious, anyway. He may lose one eye. It was a bell boy who caught him in the act and jogged up his arm. The bullet just grazed the brow and went through the ceiling. It was the smoke that got the eye. Ass! Not to lock his door! Some bell boy! Nerve, that kid had. I got his story too. Don’t know why he had to butt in, though! Pressy’s not thanking him any.”