It was difficult for David to ask this. All his being and courage were summoned to the effort. Why should he need his courage?
Tom walked quietly on. David felt his vibrance. Either he was in wrath or in pain. “So that is it?” Again he was silent.
At last: “David, my friend,” in a low still tone, utterly changed from before. “Davie, you make me worry for you. This is not a mere lack of a sense of humor. This is something deeper.”
He went on quietly. His words cut into David like curved knives. Silently, David resisted. But the points of attack were too many. Attack whirled about him....
David was always looking for faults in him, doubting his honor and his word. Why? Had he so little faith in his friend? Let David tell him, had he given him cause to believe the first ill thing about him vagrant in his mind? David shifted to answer. Tom was attacking elsewhere.... David had no sense of proportion. He seemed to take from his remarks nothing but sources for quarrel. Or was it unwilling rather than unable? David was sure he could here give satisfactory answer. He was perhaps too serious and dull: he took everything Tom said so deep to heart! No cause for anger, really. Tom had veered far.... Oh, this was no exception. There were many things. The truth was David thought only of himself: David was selfish.
“Why should you always sit in judgment on me? Supposing I began this trick with you of weighing your deeds and your words to see what direct pleasure they brought to me, as a miser might sift dirt to find the grains of gold? Do you really think I couldn’t?”
A list.... The other evening, when Tom had had a headache, David had gone around smoking and whistling. Did David recall the time Tom had brought him his dinner? And the pique of David because Tom could not join him and Cornelia on some insignificant walk. As if Tom had broken a tryst. How David had his silences for a week, because of things like that. Did David perhaps remember how he had honored Tom’s desire to see him on his return from his vacation? honored it by dragging a dull outsider along for dinner. Let David think of himself wiring so to Tom. Perhaps he thought Tom’s silence meant he was not hurt that time when he broke their theater date because he had forgotten it was Lois’ birthday....
“But you said you could easily find some one else.”
“Yes, David. I am not like you. I was afraid, if I made it hard for you, I might spoil your evening. I put you at ease. The truth is, the tickets went to waste. Yes, both of them. I had set my mind on that evening belonging to us. Do you think I cared most about seeing Annie Russell? I did not choose to go with some one else, on the occasion when I had chosen to go with you. That night, if you want to know, I sat in the Library of the Bar Association and read law. It was not my sense of justice to spoil your evening which you had chosen to spend with your cousin Lois, because you had chosen to spoil mine.”
“You know that isn’t fair! You know I went to the Deanes, because I had to. Out of a sense of duty.”