There were widows whose hearts and whose bank-accounts were large, and whose afternoon teas were popular; the seasoned group about Enoch knew them all. Indeed, their daily lives would have been dull existences without them. At their homes they met other charming women—and so it went. New York was not such a bad place after all. Some of these faithful pals of theirs were getting older, but that was to be expected; besides, they were getting older themselves, and the woman of thirty—let us say thirty-six, to be truthful—was beginning to seem young to them. As for “the old guard,” their good hearts and presence of mind had been tried and proven scores of times, never a reproach, God bless them, never—even when a fellow called after a heavy day at the club, the good old welcome was there, the same genial gleam of womanly affection and understanding. Then those formal occasions—a bevy of people to tea when a chap least expected it, and had to hang on like grim death to his best manners, and the soberest corner of his brain to pass the trembling sandwiches, and keep a cup of tea on its saucer with the skill of a juggler. Then on with a fresh whiskey and soda, served far more daintily than at the club—the heavy, generous decanter, the tall, frail glass, the Irish-lace doilies. Laughter, the fragrance of violets, those serious little tête-è-têtes which generally amount to nothing. The warm pressure of a hand in a formal good-by—bah! it is a dull game to be always drinking with men. Those interminable rounds at the club; the same dull men and the same dull stories. Men bored Lamont. The horizon of his playground lay far beyond that of most of his friends. His knowledge of life, too. When there were a woman’s eyes to drink to he lost no time—to him the subtle spell of her whole being slipped, as it were, into his glass, quickening his pulse like a magic draft. What did it matter if he was now and then dragged to the opera, that she might see and be seen? There were moments which amply repaid the sacrifice.
Throughout it all Enoch had not opened his lips. He had absorbed their blasé twaddle about marriage, the hinderance of children, and had drunk in with increasing disgust their eulogy over their various women friends. They had to a man at that table laid bare to him the worthlessness of their lives, their contemptible egoism, the hollow mockery in which they held love. Even at the Rabelaisian tale of Lamont’s he had held his tongue, but now the slow-gathering pent-up rage within him exploded, as sudden as a pistol-shot.
“It’s a cheap game some of you fellows are playing,” he cried hotly, wrenching forward in his chair and riveting his gaze on Lamont.
The rest stared at him in amazement.
“I mean exactly what I say—a cheap game—do you understand me?”
The muscles of his jaw quivered. A murmur of grumbling protest circled the table.
“I’m talking to you, Lamont,” he half shouted. “You seem to forget, sir, that there are some things sacred in life.” He brought up his closed fist sharply. “That there are some good women in this world, whom marriage has made happy, whom children have made happy, whom the love of an honest man has been a comfort and a blessing.”
“Oh! cut it out, Crane,” groaned fat Billy Adams. “We’re not here to listen to a sermon.”
“To whom,” continued Enoch vibrantly, bringing down his closed fist on the table’s edge, “men with your blasé worldly ideas, your sapped and satiated senses, your ridicule of everything that stands for honesty and common decency, your mockery of that which life holds dear, are loathsome. That’s exactly the word for it—loathsome.”
Lamont shifted back in his seat, flicking the ashes from his cigarette irritably—a sullen gleam in his black eyes.