'Why—yes. In a minute... Say, Hump, do you suppose they'll—you know, I ain't afraid'—an uprush of feeling coloured his voice, brought a shake to it—'I don't know. Perhaps I am afraid. All those people—you know, at Stanley's...'
Humphrey did an unusual thing; laid his hand on Henry's shoulder affectionately; then took his arm and led him along the alley, saying:—
'We'll go down to the lunch counter. It's just as well, Hen. Better get sure of yourself first.'
He wondered, as they walked rapidly on—Henry had a tendency to walk fast and faster when brooding or excited—whether the boy would ever get sure of himself. There were queer, bitter, profoundly confusing thoughts in his own mind, and an emotional tension, but back of all this, coming through it and softening him, his feeling for Henry. It was something of an elder brother's feeling, I think. Henry seemed very young. It was wicked that he had to suffer with all those cynical older men. It might mark the boy for life. Such things happened.
He decided to watch him closely. Sooner or later the thing would hit him full. He would have to be protected then. Even from himself, perhaps. In a way it oughtn't to be worse for him than it had been after the Hoffmann's Garden incident.
But it was worse. The other had been, after all, no more than an incident. This, now, was an overpowering fact. The town didn't have to notice the other. And despite the gossiping instinct, your small community is rather glad to edge away from unpleasant surmises that are not established facts. Facts are so uncompromising. And so disrupting. And sometimes upsetting to standardised thought.
'That's it,' thought Humphrey—he was reduced to thought Henry was striding on in white silence—'it's a fact. They can't evade it. Only thing they can do, if they're to keep comfortable about their dam' town, is to kill everybody connected with the mess. Have to revise party and dinner lists. And it'll raise Ned with the golf tournament. They'll resent all that. And they'll have to show outsiders that the thing is an amazing exception. Nothing else going on like it. They'll have to show that.'
3
The next morning Henry—stiff, distrait, his eyes wandering a little now and then and his sensitive mouth twitching nervously—breakfasted with Humphrey at Stanley's.
People—some people—spoke to him. But he winced at every greeting. Humphrey watched him narrowly. He was ablaze with self-consciousness. But he held his head up pretty well.