“Meaning by which that some of my address for the next two-three weeks will be care of Mrs. Rose Severance, 4th floor, the Nineveh, Riverside Drive, New York—you know the place, I showed it to you once from a bus-top when we were talking the mysterious lady over. And that I don't think Mr. Theodore Billett will graduate cum laude from Columbia Law School. In fact, I think it very possible that Mr. Billett will join Mr. Oliver Crowe, the celebrated unpublished novelist on a pilgrimage to Paris for to cure their broken hearts and go to the devil like gentlemen. Eh, Ollie?”
“Well, that's all right for me,” says Oliver combatively. “And I always imagined we'd find each other in hell. I'm not trying to be inhospitable with my own pet red-hot gridiron, but all the same—”
“Now, Crowe, for Pete's sake, it's five o'clock in the morning and I'm catching the 7.12—”
And Oliver is too sleepy to argue the point. Besides he knows quite well that any arguments he can use will only drive Ted, in his present state of mind, a good deal farther and faster along the road he has so dramatically picked out for himself. So, between trying to think of some means of putting either sense or the fear of God into Elinor Piper, whatever Ted may say about it, and wondering how the latter would take a suggestion to come over to Melgrove for a while instead of starting an immoral existence with that beautiful but possessive friend of Louise's, he drops off to sleep.
XXXIII
Oliver had depended on Ted's noisy habits in dressing and packing to wake him and give them a chance to talk before Ted left—but when he woke it was to hear a respectful servantly voice saying “Ten o'clock, sir!” and his first look around the room showed him that Ted's bed was empty and Ted's things were gone. There was a scribbled note propped up against the mirror, though.
“Dear Ollie:
“So long—and thanks for both good advice
and sympathy. The latter helped if the former
didn't. Drop me a message at 252A as soon
as you decide on this French proposition. I'm
serious about it. TED.”
By the time he had read this through, Oliver began to feel rather genuinely alarmed.
He could not believe that the whole affair between Ted and Elinor Piper had gone so utterly wrong as the note implied—he had had a whimsical superstition that it must succeed because he was playing property man to it after his own appearance as Romeo had failed—but he knew Ted and the two years' fight against the struggling nervous restlessness and discontent with everything that didn't have either speed or danger in it that the latter, like so many in his position, had had to make. His mouth tightened—no girl on earth, even Nancy, could realize exactly what that meant—the battle to recover steadiness and temperance and sanity in a temperament that was in spite of its poised externals most brilliantly sensitive, most leapingly responsive to all strong stimuli—a temperament moreover that the war and the armistice between them had turned wholly toward the stimuli of fever—and Ted had made it with neither bravado nor bluster and without any particular sense of doing very much—and now this girl was going to smash it and him together as if she were doing nothing more important than playing with jackstones.