Linda Lee, Incorporated: A Novel

by Louis Joseph Vance

"It isn't that," he stammered—"I mean to say, I wish you wouldn't look at it that way. You punished me more cruelly than you knew; but I deserved it all, and I've no complaint to make and hold no grudge. In fact—the truth is—I've got a lot to be grateful to you for, Linda; you cured me of my two greatest vices, and whatever the future may hold for me one thing is sure: I won't go to smash on account of either wine or women. And so, though I quite understand what your feeling toward me is, and how useless it would be to ask you to forget, I'll always be glad if anything I can do will serve in part payment of my debt. It would make me very happy now if I could go away believing that in any time of trouble you would turn to me as to, at least, a friend."

"I understand, Bel, and I'm most appreciative, but"—Lucinda smiled with a shadow of sadness—"it wouldn't do, what you suggest. I hear what you say, I know what you have in mind, and—it would never do. After what has been, there could be no friendship in true sense between you and me; we're neither of us people whom half-measures would content. And since we are as we are, since with us it must be all or nothing...."

She made an end by rising in a manner he couldn't misinterpret.

"It must be nothing?" he implored, holding her hand.

Behind the mask of her composure Lucinda was absurdly agitated and, on that account, a little angry. She refused to admit she had any excuse for feeling upset; she had the upper hand with Bel and meant to hold it, she had nothing imaginable to fear; yet she was horribly afraid he might see....

"Good-bye, Bel," she said, with not unkind decision but decision unmistakable for all that. "And good luck. But ... please never come back...."

That night she sobbed herself awake from dreams of dear days dead, and lay for hours hating the cheerless comfort of hotel rooms, missing poignantly the intimacy of her home and the sense of security she had known nowhere else. Would she ever find such another haven for her drifting soul?

It wasn't that she was in any way hindered from settling down wherever she liked and surrounding herself with possessions. But could any place where love was not be fairly termed a home?

In the morning she rose with a heart as heavy as any she had ever known to address herself to the daily grind—to term which deadly were but to cheapen the detrition of morale resulting from its wear upon the soul.

Yet she had to be fair, she couldn't pretend she had any right to whimper; she was having her own way, getting precisely what she had all along been asking for; and viewed at a purely material angle, her affairs were as prosperous as heart could wish. The new director was living up to and even beyond all Zinn's claims, his revision of the continuity for the sequences remaining to be taken had been as adept as his editing of those thirty-six reels of pictorial farrago, and he was handling the crowded scenes on the supper-club set and the more intimate dramatic passages staged in the living-room with equal competence and the ease of one conscious of but not self-conscious about thorough mastery of his craft.