George gathered that Sylvia's absence from that table had impressed them both. He knew very well where she was, across the room, focus for as large a gathering as Betty's, chiefly of young men, eager for her brilliancy. Lambert went on, glancing at George his questions of the smoking-room.
It wasn't long before the dawn when George said polite things with Goodhue and Wandel, and after their pattern. In the lower hall he noticed that all these pleasure seekers, a while ago flushed and happy, had undergone a devastating change. Faces were white. Gowns looked rumpled and old. The laughter and chatter were no longer impulsive.
"The way one feels after a hard game," he thought.
Goodhue offered to take Wandel in and drop him. The little man alone seemed as fresh and neat as at the start of the evening.
"Had a good time, great person?" he asked as they drove off. "But then why shouldn't great men always have good times?"
Wandel's manner suggested that he had seen to George's good time. What he had actually done was to involve him in an open hostility with Dalrymple. The others didn't mention that youth. Was there a tactful thought for him in their restraint?
They left Wandel at an expensive bachelor apartment house overlooking the park. George gathered from Goodhue, as they drove on, that Wandel's attitude toward his family was that of an old and confidential friend.
"You see Driggs always has to be his own master," he said.
XVII
Because of the restless contrast of that trip George brought back to Princeton a new appreciation; yet beneath the outer beauty there, he knew, a man's desires and ambitions lost none of their ugliness. He stared at Sylvia's portrait, but it made him want the living body that he had touched, that was going to give him a decent fight. Already he planned for other opportunities to meet her, although with her attitude what it was he didn't see how he could use them to advance his cause; and always there was the possibility of her resenting his persistence to the point of changing her mind about telling.