He sighs, and his face smooths back a little.
“Well, Lord, I've no real reason to kick, I suppose,” he ends. “There are dozens of 'em like me—dozens and hundreds and thousands all over the shop. We had danger and all the physical pleasures and as much money as we wanted and the sense of command—all through the war. And then they come along and say 'it's all off, girls,' and you go back and settle down and play you've just come out of College in peace-times and maybe by the time you're forty you'll have a wife and an income if another scrap doesn't come along. And then when we find it isn't as easy to readjust as they think, they yammer around pop-eyed and say 'Oh, what wild young people—what naughty little wasters! They won't settle down and play Puss-in-the-corner at all—and, oh dear, oh dear, how they drink and smoke and curse 'n everything!'”
“I'm awful afraid they might be right as to what's the trouble with us, though,” says Oliver, didactically. “We are young, you know.”
“Melgrove!” the conductor howls, sleepily. “Melgrove! Melgrove!”
V
The Crowe house was both small and inconveniently situated—it was twenty full minutes walk from the station and though a little box of a garage had been one of the “all modern conveniences” so fervidly painted in the real estate agent's advertisement, the Crowes had no car. It was the last house on Undercliff Road that had any pretense to sparse grass and a stubbly hedge—beyond it were sand-dunes, delusively ornamented by the signs of streets that as yet only existed in the brain of the owner of the “development,” and, a quarter of a mile away, the long blue streak of the Sound.
Oliver's key clicked in the lock—this was fortunately one of the times when four-year-old Jane Ellen, who went about after sunset in a continual, piteous fear of “black men wif masks,” had omitted to put the chain on the door before being carried mutinously to bed. Oliver switched on the hall light and picked up a letter and a folded note from the card tray.
“Ted, Ollie and Dickie will share that little bijou, the sleeping porch, unless Ted prefers the third-story bathtub,” the note read. “Breakfast at convenience for those that can get it themselves—otherwise at nine. And DON'T wake Dickie up.
“MOTHER.”