He had laughed his defiance. "Barry's all right—but you've got to give him a little rope, Mary."
When he had left her, Mary had walked on slowly, her heart filled with foreboding. Barry was not like Jerry. Jerry, coarse of fiber, lacking temperament, would probably come to middle age safely—he would never be called upon to pay the piper as Barry would for dancing to the tune of the follies of youth.
She wrote to Gordon, warning him. "Keep Barry busy," she said. "Jerry told me that he intended to have 'the time of his young life'—and he will want Barry to share it."
Gordon smiled over the letter. "Poor Mary," he told Constance; "she has carried Barry for so long on her shoulders, and she can't realize that he is at last learning to stand alone."
But Constance did not smile. "We never could bear Jerry Tuckerman; he always made Barry do things."
"Nobody can make me do things when I don't want to do them," said Gordon comfortably and priggishly, "and Barry must learn that he can't put the blame on anybody's shoulders but his own."
Constance sighed. She did not quite share Gordon's sense of security. Barry was different. He was a dear, and trying so hard; but Jerry had always had some power to sway him from his best, a sinister inexplicable influence.
Jerry, arriving, hung around Barry for several days, tempting him, like the villain in the play.
But Barry refused to be tempted. He was busy—and he had just had a letter from Leila.
"I simply can't run around town with you, Tuckerman," he explained. "Holding down a job in an office like this isn't like holding down a government job."