Mr. Bailey squinted at his son. “Huh! I should think so! I counted up to seven rum collinses last night. What you trying to do—drink yourself to death?”
Biff’s hands were trembling. A light perspiration shone on his face, here and there, in little clusters. “Anybody count yours? I have a hangover you could sell to an amusement park. Make the roller coaster feel like a lawn swing.”
“Who told you that crack?” Sarah asked.
Their father swallowed coffee. A big, square man, growing thinner as he came nearer to sixty. A man with a rectangular face and a chin that rode out beyond his necktie formidably. He wore rimless, angle-sided spectacles. The eyes behind them were china blue, but as bright as glass. His face was ruddy, and the almost unwrinkled skin on it was shaved so close it looked peeled. He wore his wavy gray hair long so that it would fall across his toupee-sized bald spot. He had a good voice, deep, resonant, and not loud unless he wanted it to be. He firmly believed that, in every hour of every day of his life, he had done the right thing—his duty—without consideration of his own pleasure or pain.
That such an attitude is psychologically—even physiologically—dangerous, cannot be denied. But it is the commonest attitude among successful men not just in America, but everywhere. Most people thought Kendrick Bailey was a brilliant man and a good man. In many ways, he was both. He looked, now, at his wife, and he said, “I repeat.
Does Jimmie know that there is another big party for him tonight?”
“Don’t be so hostile,” his wife replied. “I’ll ease him into the fact when he comes down—after he’s had some breakfast. No doubt he’ll sleep late. He must be very tired—going through submarine zones and all that. He certainly looked it when he got off the train.”
“He looked rotten,” Biff said comfortably. “The lousy interventionist!”
“Hannah,” said Mr. Bailey to his wife, “we made a mistake with that boy. Should never have allowed him to go to Oxford. He got the European taint.”
“It was the ‘V’ on his luggage,” Sarah said, “that was so darned corny! The very first thing I saw—even before I saw Jimmie—was that big suitcase Biff and I gave him for a going-away present, and that enormous red, white, and blue ‘V.’ He might at least have had the decency to find out that the better people in his own home town aren’t having any part of things like that!”