“You'll be down before long,” he assured her. “And making me pies. Remember those pies you used to bake?”
“You always were a great one for my pies,” she said, complacently.
He kissed her when he left. He had always marveled at the strange lack of demonstrativeness in the household, and he knew that she valued his small tendernesses.
“Now remember,” he said, “light out at ten o'clock, and no going downstairs in the middle of the night because you smell smoke. When you do, it's my pipe.”
“I don't think you hardly ever go to bed, Willy.”
“Me? Get too much sleep. I'm getting fat with it.”
The stale little joke was never stale with her. He left her smiling, and went down the stairs and out into the street.
He had no plan in his mind except to see Louis Akers, and to find out from him if he could what truth there was in Edith Boyd's accusation. He believed Edith, but he must have absolute certainty before he did anything. Girls in trouble sometimes shielded men. If he could get the facts from Louis Akers—but he had no idea of what he would do then. He couldn't very well tell Lily, but her people might do something. Or Mrs. Doyle.
He knew Lily well enough to know that she would far rather die than marry Akers, under the circumstances. That her failure to marry Louis Akers would mean anything as to his own relationship with her he never even considered. All that had been settled long ago, when she said she did not love him.
At the Benedict he found that his man had not come home, and for an hour or two he walked the streets. The city seemed less majestic to him than usual; its quiet by-streets were lined with homes, it is true, but those very streets hid also vice and degradation, and ugly passions. They sheltered, but also they concealed.