That night, according to his wont, Jim came to smoke with me in the late evening. “Let’s take a car,” said he, “and go up and have a look at the houses.”
These were our new mansions up in Lynhurst Park Addition, now in process of erection. In the moonlight we could see them dimly, and at a little distance they looked like masses of ruins—the second childhood of houses. A stranger could have seen, from the polished columns and the piles of carved stone, that they were to be expensive and probably beautiful structures.
“What do you think of the General in the rôle of Cassandra?” asked Jim, as we sat in the skeleton room which was to be his library.
“It struck me,” said I, “as a particularly artistic bit of croaking!”
“The Captain says frequently,” said Jim, his cigar glowing like a variable star, “that opportunity knocks once. The General, I’m afraid, knocks all the time. But if it should turn out that he’s right about the—the—dervish-dance ... it would be ... to put it mildly ... a horse on us, Al, wouldn’t it?”
I had no answer to this fanciful speech, and made none. Instead, I told him of Giddings’s love-sickness.
“The philosophy of Iago has broken down,” said he, “and the boy is sort of short-circuited. Antonia can take him in hand, and turn him out full of confidence; and with that, I’ll answer for the lady. That can be fixed easy, and ought to be. Let’s walk back.”
“What was it he said?” he asked, as we parted. “‘Coma, cold forms, still hands, and extinction.’ Well, if the dervish-dance does wind up in that sort of thing, it’s only a short-cut to the inevitable. Those are pretty houses up there; we’d have been astounded over them when we used to fish together on Beaver Creek;—but suppose they are?
“‘They say the Lion and the Lizard keep
The Courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep;
And Bahram, that great hunter—the Wild Ass
Stamps o’er his Head, but cannot break his Sleep!’
Good-night, Al!“