“It is rather,” said Rhoda.
“It is very,” said Mrs. Ponting. “I never heard such talk. Haiti indeed.... Whoever heard of atrocities in Haiti?”
Emily was standing now and, with a feeling of desolation, Edward Williams watched her putting on a hat rather like Napoleon’s. She was nervously arranging her clothes. She felt that she had been talking too much. She had a curious lapse into humility and talked in a little frightened undertone to herself. “I expect my hair needs tidying awfully ... it’s a tragedy that all lockets hang face downward ... my bag ... her name is Esther.”
It had been a silly party. Everybody felt that—even Edward, though the party had left him a changed man. No room could be anything but dramatic to him after seven cocktails, but he realised now that the party had been silly, and that a pillar of thin air against a background of Rhoda’s pictures was an inadequate substitute for Emily. For Emily was gone. Edward reminded himself that he could walk perfectly straight if he concentrated. He reached Rhoda successfully.
“Must home,” he said first by mistake and then concentrated again. “I must be going home. By the way, I may change my mind about the Orient. Too far. Too sudden. I’ll think it over.” His own voice sounded to him very indefinite and he seemed to himself to have been talking for a long time without getting anything said. “I’ll tell you what,” he added intensely, “I’ll think it over.”
One of the most fascinating results of seven Gin-Old-Fashioneds is the disappearance of intervals between events. Before Edward R. Williams had time to think another thought, there he was looking down a precipice of street at a deliciously small Emily a hundred feet below. San Francisco streets often nose-dive like this. The grass grows between their cobblestones because nobody dares to use them except pulley cars and persons with very strong ankles. Emily was walking gingerly down. Beside her, plucking protectively but ineffectually at her sleeve, was Banner Hope.
Edward followed. If he should let himself run nothing could save him from falling like a stone into Chinatown and bouncing thence into the bay. He concentrated sternly on the alpine formation of the sidewalk, and when he reached Emily she was alone.
“Wez Bope gone?” asked Edward.
“His tram came first,” replied Emily. “I’m waiting for a Ferry tram.”
“Tram,” triumphed Edward, who had been long exiled among mere street-cars. “That’s the stuff to give ’em.... Tram.... Do ’em good by Gosh....”