“I was afraid you’d forgotten. I remember the evening perfectly. We stopped at the Country Club to dance and just played around by ourselves. But we did have a good time!”
His spirits were soaring; through his talk ran an undercurrent of mischievous delight in his freedom. “It’s just bully to see you again!” he repeated several times. “While I was playing I kept thinking of the royal fun we used to have. Do you remember that day our families had a picnic—we were just kids then—and you and I wandered away and got lost looking for wild flowers or whatever the excuse was; and a big storm came up and our mothers gave us a good raking when we came back all soaked and everybody was scared for fear we’d tumbled into the river!”
To Grace the remembrance of this adventure was not nearly so thrilling as the fact that Bob, now married, still chortled over the recollection and was obviously delighted to be spending an evening with her while his wife enjoyed herself in her own fashion at home. He would probably not tell Evelyn that he had taken the daughter of his father’s old business associate driving, a girl who clerked in a department store and was clearly out of his social orbit. Here was another episode which Grace knew she dared not mention at home; Ethel and her mother would be horrified. But Grace was happy in the thought that Bob Cummings still found pleasure in her company even if she was Number Eighteen at Shipley’s and took and accepted tips from kindly-disposed customers. He halted the car at a point which afforded a broad sweep of moonlit field and woodland.
“You know, Grace, sometimes I’ve been hungry and positively homesick for a talk with you such as we’ve had tonight.”
“Please drive on! You mustn’t say things like that.”
“Well, that’s the way I feel anyhow. It’s queer how I haven’t been able to do anything I wanted to with my life. I’m like a man who’s been pushed on a train he didn’t want to take and can’t get off.”
Here again was his old eager appeal for sympathy. He was weak, she knew, with the weakness that is a defect of such natures. It would be perfectly easy to begin a flirtation with him, possibly to see him frequently in some such way as she saw him now. It was wrong to encourage him, but her curiosity as to how far he would go overcame her scruples; it would do no harm to lead him on a little.
“You ought to be very happy, Bob. You have everything to make you happy!”
“I’ve made mistakes all down the line,” he answered with a flare of defiance. “I ought to have stood out against father when he put me into the business. I’m no good at it. But Merwin made a mess of things; father’s got him on a ranch out in Montana now, and Tom’s got the bug to be a doctor and nothing can shake him. So I have to sit at a desk every day doing things I hate and doing them badly of course. And for the rest of it——!”
He stopped short of the rest of it, which Grace surmised was his marriage to Evelyn. It was his own fault that he had failed to control and manage his life. He might have resisted his father when it came to going into business and certainly it spoke for a feeble will if he had married to gratify his mother’s social ambitions. She was about to bid him drive on when he turned toward her saying: