He dined with the Deanes. He had no plans at all for after dinner. The dinner would be big, he lazy. If his uncle offered him a cigar and Lois was amiable, he might sit around all afternoon. He did not much care. But his uncle had his erratic ways: in and out of business, one never could tell about him. Doubtless the moody angles of Lois were due to her father. Sometimes he would treat him as a man:
“Have a cigar, sir?” David accepted and liked this. Moreover the effect of a cigar was always to make him heavy and sleepy: unfit either for walking or a visit: in no heroic mood for visiting a friend toward whom his sense of guilt made him uncomfortable.
Then again, his uncle would light his own cigar and forget him; perhaps even say:
“Well, children, I am going to take a nap.... Run along.” He napped on the dining-room sofa.
This happened on Thanksgiving.
Lois was somber. David knew that her engagement—it had never been more than a casual trial—was broken. Once more she was in the open field. And more cynical, more difficult than ever. She had been spiteful, it seemed to David, on this Feast of Thanksgiving. For the first time in a rare long stretch, he had almost preferred the flinty steadiness of her sister. Lois had nothing to say to him, to do with him. When she spoke, she managed an air of objective and disdainful interest that was worse than indifference. As if she were thinking: “What can this specimen possibly have to say?” After dinner, she struck out her hand and smiled formally into his face:
“Good-by, David: I have a date and it’s late. Can I drop you somewhere?”
He spurned her offer. He found himself out of the house, it was still snowing. He had a sentimental turn over the snow and his loneliness, his being turned out lonely into the snow.
He began to trudge and to enjoy the walk. He had had no cigar. He was clear-headed. The snow ceased, the air of the darkling City was soft like the touch of silk. He trudged for several hours. Five blocks from her house, the summons came to Cornelia.
He hated the Deanes that afternoon. It was an old track in his brain that led him now from them to Cornelia, as his old revolts had led him three years before. True, Mrs. Deane had said to him: “You can stay, dear, if you want and entertain me.” True, the thought came that this might have been more comfortable after all. He did not want to go home. Tom had a way of wreathing their room in smoke and cynical smiles on holidays. It was plain that the time had come to go as his feet now took him....