“Wasn’t Emily supposed to be looking after you?”
Stone gave a sharp cracked laugh. “I guess Mom thought so. Mom’s kinda soft. Emerly knows I’m a feller kin look out for himself. Dad wouldn’t give a whoop. He don’t know yet, but he should worry. He’s a financier. He sent me a thousand bucks to blow—till he could come back from Japan. I got the letter, that is to say, it was addressed to Emerly. There was a thousand bucks for her to blow on me insidum. Emerly’s a sport, I’ll say. She acted like she was leaving me in charge of a dame here—so’s Mom wouldn’t get mad at her for piking. But there was nothing to that. The other dame don’t worry me any.”
“She is shameless,” thought Edward. “Loving Emily is like loving a tigress.” He felt a better man because he loved the shameless Emily. It was like a romance among supermen, he thought.
“Your mother asked me once to take care of you and bring you to your father. I had business at the time that prevented me. But she was very anxious that I should. Perhaps she told you——”
“Mebbe,” said Stone indifferently. The nut sundae nearly oozed out of his mouth, but was checked by sleight of suction. “She’s kinda soft, is Mom.”
“You oughtn’t to be here by yourself.”
“I’m sicka being handed around,” said Stone. “Hey, boy, another nut sundae. And then some. I’m a shark for nut sundaes.”
“Well, we can be friends anyway,” said Edward shyly. “A man can be friends with another man.”
Stone took no notice of this. He lifted up the corner of his jacket and licked from it a lump of nut sundae which had accidentally fallen there. Then he walked away, whining a little song.
Edward had not slept at all. The hope he had nursed a few hours earlier seemed divorced from reality. He remembered suddenly something that his mental cowardice had swept from his mind. “Emily loves Tam,” he thought, trying to hurt himself as much as possible. “Emily has never thought of me again. She loves Tam. She wants to steal Tam from Lucy. She is shameless. She is full of fury because she has not got Tam. I am to her the least of the people she met over there somewhere in America, while she was engaged in pursuing Tam.” He was determined to throw himself into an agony, he was revelling in fatigue and despair. He imagined his next meeting with Emily. Her fierce eyes would detach themselves reluctantly from Tam’s face. They would turn cold as they rested on Edward’s own face. Edward’s face would look dull and pale; he felt very conscious of the lifelessness of his face. He saw himself so grey as to be almost invisible. Near him now there was an arrangement of mirrors that showed him his own rarely seen profile. It was detestable that life— even the mean allowance of life that was his—should be given to so poor a body. His upper lip was too long, it sloped forward without the curve that enlivens most human lips; his chin was thin and fleshless as though made of paper. His face seemed to him hardly a human face. His shoulders were very round. Out of the corner of his eye he watched his reflection in profile present a cocktail glass to that slack sad mouth. Cocktails at least were left to him. Everything that requires only weakness was left to him. “If all this were not so, this is what I would do.” The intensity of his despair was, with the help of the cocktail, defeating its own ends ... “if love perhaps gave me life ... if I were as shameless as she is ... and if shamelessness could give me a little of the splendour that it has given her, this is what I would do ... I would get control of that thousand dollars ... I would travel night and day, in fury and certainty ... I would find her on the banks of the river, the high reeds as high as her head ... I would walk to her with a new tread, a heavy, sure, new tread, and when she looked she might love me or hate me ... but she would remember me then.” And now, though he tried again superficially to revive his luxury of despair, he could not really think himself despicable. His coward mind leapt at the accuser from behind, and in the dark and the dust the accuser was strangled. Edward smiled at the boy who brought him a fresh cocktail. When he smiled he saw now that his upper lip curved after all.