Eva talked it over with her husband in that intimate, kimonoed hour that precedes bedtime. She gesticulated heatedly with her hair brush.
“It’s disgusting, that’s what it is. Perfectly disgusting. There’s no fool like an old fool. Imagine! A creature like that. At his time of life.”
There exists a strange and loyal kinship among men. “Well, I don’t know,” Ben said now, and even grinned a little. “I suppose a boy’s got to sow his wild oats sometime.”
“Don’t be any more vulgar than you can help,” Eva retorted. “And I think you know, as well as I, what it means to have that Overton boy interested in Ethel.”
“If he’s interested in her,” Ben blundered, “I guess the fact that Ethel’s uncle went to the theater with some one who wasn’t Ethel’s aunt won’t cause a shudder to run up and down his frail young frame, will it?”
“All right,” Eva retorted. “If you’re not man enough to stop it, I’ll have to, that’s all. I’m going up there with Stell this week.”
They did not notify Jo of their coming. Eva telephoned his apartment when she knew he would be out, and asked his man if he expected his master home to dinner that evening. The man had said yes. Eva arranged to meet Stell in town. They would drive to Jo’s apartment together, and wait for him there.
When she reached the city Eva found turmoil there. The first of the American troops to be sent to France were leaving. Michigan Boulevard was a billowing, surging mass: flags, pennants, banners, crowds. All the elements that make for demonstration. And over the whole—quiet. No holiday crowd, this. A solid, determined mass of people waiting patient hours to see the khaki-clads go by. Three years of indefatigable reading had brought them to a clear knowledge of what these boys were going to.
“Isn’t it dreadful!” Stell gasped.
“Nicky Overton’s only nineteen, thank goodness.”