"I met her a few times is all. But she's pretty transparent, under all that careful sophistication, isn't she?" Clayton stirred his coffee, focusing on the spoon as if it were some precision instrument. "A good kid."
"She's all right," said Kintyre.
"I suppose you feel an obligation toward her?"
Kintyre bridled. "I didn't mean to keyhole," said Clayton hurriedly. "I just couldn't help wondering what'll become of her. Somebody has to help her over the hump. She'll never make it alone."
Against his own principles of respect for privacy, Kintyre found himself speculating. Where had Clayton picked up such intuitions? His first wife, whom he had loved, seemed by his few chance remarks and his Who's Who biography to have been the conventional helpmeet of a conventional young man in the thirties: grocery clerk, salesman, pitchforked down by the Depression, up again via WPA to construction foreman to warehouse foreman to minor executive. Finally she got tuberculosis, with complications, and took a couple of years to die. The medical bills ruined him; he parked the three children with relatives for years. Afterward, on the way up once more in the defense boom and the early war boom, he married the boss's daughter. He got to be general superintendent of an aircraft plant before he learned what a bitch she was. The divorce cost him that job and his savings. He applied for an Army commission and got one in 1943.
Kintyre knew little else; his information was only the gossip one is bound to encounter. Clayton had been a fairly large figure in Italy when Kintyre went over for the second time.
"Eh?" he said, pulled back to awareness.
"I asked if you wanted to take her out tonight," repeated Clayton.
"Uh—"
"Somebody ought to." As if he had heard Kintyre's thoughts, Clayton said with an enormous gentleness: "She reminds me a lot of my daughter."