“Oh, Ollie, snap out of it! That's only being dramatic. You know darn well you will darn soon. I'll be saying 'bless you, my children, increase and multiply,' inside a month if your novel goes through.”
“If! Oh well. Oh hell. I think I've wept on your shoulder long enough for tonight, Ted. Tell me your end of it—things breaking all right?”
Ted's face sets into lines that seem curiously foreign and aged for the smooth surface.
“Well—you know my trouble,” he brings out at last with some difficulty. “You ought to, anyhow—we've talked each other over too much when we were both rather planko for you not to. I'm getting along, I think. The work—ca marche assez bien. And the restlessness—can be stood. That's about all there is to say.”
Both are completely serious now.
“Bon. Very glad,” says Oliver in a low voice.
“I can stand it. I was awful afraid I couldn't when I first got back. And law interests me, really, though I've lost three years because of the war. And I'm working like a pious little devil with a new assortment of damned and when you haven't any money you can't go on parties in New York unless you raise gravy riding to a fine art. Only sometimes—well, you know how it is—”
Oliver nods.
“I'll be sitting there, at night especially, in that little tin Tophet of a room on Madison Avenue, working. I can work, if I do say it myself—I'm hoping to get through with school in January, now. But it gets pretty lonely, sometimes when there's nobody to run into that you can really talk to—the people I used to play with in College are out of New York for the summer—even Peter's down at Southampton most of the time or out at Star Bay—you're in Melgrove—Sam Woodward's married and working in Chicago—Brick Turner's in New Mexico—I've dropped out of the Wall Street bunch in the class that hang out at the Yale Club—I'm posted there anyhow, and besides they've all made money and I haven't, and all they want to talk about is puts and calls. And then you remember things.
“The time my pilot and I blew into Paris when we thought we were hitting somewhere around Nancy till we saw that blessed Eiffel Tower poking out of the fog. And the Hotel de Turenne on Rue Vavin and getting up in the morning and going out for a café cognac breakfast, and everything being amiable and pleasant, and kidding along all the dear little ladies that sat on the terrasse when they dropped in to talk over last evening's affairs. I suppose I'm a sensualist—”