Nelly was very pleasant; just that—pleasant. She pleasantly sat as his partner at Five Hundred, and pleasantly declined to go to the moving pictures with him. She was getting more and more tired, staying till seven at the store, preparing what she called “special stunts” for the summer white sale. Friday evening he saw her soft fresh lips drooping sadly as she toiled up the front steps before dinner. She went to bed at eight, at which time Istra was going out to dinner with a thin, hatchet-faced sarcastic-looking man in a Norfolk jacket and a fluffy black tie. Mr. Wrenn resented the Norfolk jacket. Of course, the kingly men in evening dress would be expected to take Istra away from him, but a Norfolk jacket—He did not call it that. Though he had worn one in the fair village of Aengusmere, it was still to him a “coat with a belt.”
He thought of Nelly all evening. He heard her—there on the same floor with him—talking to Miss Proudfoot, who stood at Nelly’s door, three hours after she was supposed to be asleep.
“No,” Nelly was saying with evidently fictitious cheerfulness, “no, it was just a little headache…. It’s much better. I think I can sleep now. Thank you very much for coming.”
Nelly hadn’t told Mr. Wrenn that she had a severe headache—she who had once, a few weeks before, run to him with a cut in her soft small finger, demanding that he bind it up…. He went slowly to bed.
He had lain awake half an hour before his agony so overpowered him that he flung out of bed. He crouched low by the bed, like a child, his legs curled under him, the wooden sideboard pressing into his chest in one long line of hot pain, while he prayed:
“O God, O God, forgive me, forgive me, oh, forgive me! Here I been forgetting Nelly (and I love her) and comparing her with Istra and not appreciating her, and Nelly always so sweet to me and trusting me so—O God, keep me away from wickedness!”
He huddled there many minutes, praying, the scorching pressure of the bedside growing more painful. All the while the camp-fire he had shared with Istra was burning within his closed eyes, and Istra was visibly lording it in a London flat filled with clever people, and he was passionately aware that the line of her slim breast was like the lip of a shell; the line of her pallid cheek, defined by her flame-colored hair, something utterly fine, something he could not express.
“Oh,” he groaned, “she is like that poetry stuff in Shakespeare that’s so hard to get…. I’ll be extra nice to Nelly at the picnic Sunday…. Her trusting me so, and then me—O God, keep me away from wickedness!”
As he was going out Saturday morning he found a note from Istra waiting in the hall on the hat-rack:
Do you want to play with poor Istra tomorrow Sat. afternoon and perhaps evening, Mouse? You have Saturday afternoon off, don’t you? Leave me a note if you can call for me at 1.30.