“Nothing to stay for? You for Shanghai, what? Well, well, if I didn’t happen to be in love with Lucy, I’d come too.”
In love with Lucy when Emily loved him? “It is because he is a cad,” thought Edward. “Lucy’s thin love is the kind of love a cad values. Vain men only live by the love of second-rate women. Emily’s love doesn’t flatter Tam enough. Her love is too insolent. She couldn’t cringe. It takes an inglorious man like me to appreciate glory. It is because I am so wholly in the dark that I can see the light of Emily.” Edward tried to imagine Emily’s eager face, should her love and eagerness be refused. He thought of her eyes pierced with pain, her brows drawn together, her cheeks white, the generous expression of her mouth frozen on pale lips.
“I’ll walk down to the river again with you, if you like. I want to see some fighting. They say the Szechaanese may march in at any minute.”
“Say, what did Emerly say about me?” asked Stone in a muffled voice. This seemed to Edward an altogether trivial interruption.
“Said you were a bully kid, of course,” said Tam. He hugged Stone’s shoulders, shook the boy backwards and forwards and made him look ridiculous.
“That is the manner of real men with school-boys,” thought Edward. “If I had adopted that manner Stone would have loved me.”
“D’you know what happened to me this morning?” Tam began. “Stone, listen, you’ll roar over this yarn. When I got out of my bath, I couldn’t find one of my bedroom slippers. You know the coldness of the floors of Chinese bathrooms. My little toe is still suffering from infantile paralysis——”
“We must go,” said Edward. “Stone, come.”
Tam’s eyes wore almost the same alarmed expression that Lucy’s had worn. That expression apparently meant that Edward was not doing what was expected of him. He ought to have been looking eagerly at Tam, waiting with a suspended laugh on a caught breath for the climax of the story.
“Listen to the yarn,” said Tam with a touch of asperity. “I hadn’t worn the slippers since my bath the morning before. I knew I’d left them both by the bath tub. Their names are Abelard and Heloïse. Abelard was there, ready for duty, but Heloïse——”