Jeremy heard the reply “Is that so?” in a tone of flat and polite simulation of interest, issue upon the air. It was obviously the result of a mechanical ventriloquism of his own, for he was quite sure that his lips had been for the moment incapable of speech. Of course he had always known that it must come. Inevitable with a girl like Marcia. But hope, though it withers, clings hardily to the last pulsing of secret life in the young. Even in the heart-emptiness of a long year of silence—except for the one note delivered by Buddy Higman—Jeremy had cherished a delusion dear as on the day when he first met her.... He became aware that Laurens was saying something to him. Politics—that was it. He had to fix his mind on politics, and though life had abruptly become sterile of hope and dreams, nevertheless there was a job to do. For the next twenty minutes, Jeremy passed through an ordeal which entitled him to a hero’s medal. He forced his aching mind to take in what Laurens was telling him, and afterward he fashioned from it a skillful and dispassionate interview.
After Laurens’s departure the editor opened the drawer in his desk which was always kept locked. Therein were a dozen golf scores—he was still very young, and his stock of souvenirs had been pathetically scant—her note and the little photograph. He understood, now, why she had written him no letter. When she gave him up, she had mapped out her course for herself. If she were not formally betrothed then, she had determined upon the step. And having determined, she ended it all, then and there. It was the honorable way. It was the direct, definite, frank way. It was the right way. It was Marcia’s way.
He looked yearningly at the photograph. Wonderful how that tiny oblong of paper, touched with a few flat tints could so evoke the very essence and fragrance and challenging sweetness of her! She looked out at him, all soft radiance in the hard radiance of the sunlight which flooded her, and his fingers, bidden to tear the likeness to fragments and scatter it—not in resentment but as a sacrificial formality—trembled and slackened. What harm, after all, in keeping the picture? It meant nothing—and therein Jeremy Robson lied to his own soul. It meant that he still clung to his vision, which nothing had blurred. For no other woman had so much as impinged upon the outskirts of his imagination. There was neither time nor space for women other than Marcia. He restored the picture, the note, the prim numerals of the golf scores—how vividly he could see the full, lithe swing of the young body vivid with untainted health and vitality as her brassie flicked the ball cleanly from its turfy lie!—and locked the drawer again. There lay hopes dead and ideals still unconquerably alive.
Reading the Laurens interview, conspicuously played up, on its merits as news, Martin Embree felt rise within him dark misgivings as to his supporter. He was of that type which, in its self-centered mind, forbodes disloyalty and suspects betrayal in any divergence of opinion or policy from its own standards. But his smile was as brilliant as usual, perhaps even more so, when he next met Jeremy.
“Pretty handsome send-off you gave Laurens.”
“Yes. I like him. He’s straight.”
“So’s a snake—when it’s dead. I told you to look out for him.”
“I did,” said the editor good-humoredly. “I don’t think he fooled me any. Or even tried to.”
“He’s likely to be the man we’ve got to fight for the governorship.”