“Oh, good heavens! Are you going to let that bit of commonplace asininity worry you for the rest of your life? Let it slide and forget it. You didn’t do that painted and powdered Jezebel any harm—you couldn’t.”
“Perhaps not: the harm I did was to myself.... It was the first time, Harry. I wish I could make you believe that it will also be the last.”
Bromley pushed his chair back and got up, laughing quietly.
“What your conscience needs, Philip, is a rain-coat. You’re out for a lot of trouble if you let such things soak in and make you soggy and uncomfortable, and you’d find the rain-coat a profitable acquisition. Let’s go get some cigars.”
Not knowing anything further to be done in the way of tracing the lost Dabney family beyond waiting hopefully for an answer to his note, Philip joined Bromley in making a round of the rental agencies; and, when a suitable double apartment was found, in selecting their joint stock of furnishings. This done, a period of inaction followed which was more trying than the hardest labor he had ever performed. Under the goading of unwonted idleness he grew moody and at times almost irritable; a frame of mind that acquired an added touch of moroseness when his note to Jean Dabney was returned to him from the post-office with “Uncalled for” rubber-stamped across the face of the envelope. Bromley had made a few social acquaintances and was constantly making more; but his efforts to drag Philip out of the rut into which he had fallen went for nothing.
“No, no—I wish you’d let up, Harry!” he would say, when Bromley sought to include him in the invitations which were coming in increasing numbers to the breezy young Philadelphian. “I can’t talk silly nothings, I don’t dance, and I hardly know one card from another. Your new friends wouldn’t have any use for me.”
“Or you for them, you might add,” retorted the play-boy. “As a social animal you’re pretty nearly a total loss, Philip. Keep it up, and in time you’ll be able to give cards, spades and little casino to the sourest monk of the desert and beat him blind at his own game. Incidentally, you are headed right to join the procession of the unattached and unfettered in this hurrah city of the plain—the big bunch of fellows who are finding all the bad doors wide open, and who won’t take the trouble to knock at any of the decent ones.”
“You are preaching?—at me?” said Philip, with a sober smile.
“Call it what you please. I’ve been all the gaits and know what I’m talking about. You’ll get dry rot, and that’s worse than the other kind because it doesn’t show on the outside. You won’t think better of it and go to Mrs. Demming’s little dinner-and-after with me?”
“Not to-night; I’m pretty comfortable as I am. Chase along and have a good time in your own fashion. As you say, I’m more or less hopeless on the social side.”