"About last night," she whispered. He nodded.
"But Hughie, you said you wouldn't ever again...."
He felt despair.
"If I only hadn't ... I would...." He stopped.
"Would what, Hughie?" Fear halted him definitely. He could go no further. A misery clouded his thought. He felt her hand touching his arm.
"You mustn't feel sorry, Hugh. Please promise me you won't feel sorry...."
The sweetness of her voice overpowered him and his eyes grew wet. He tried to talk but was ashamed of the quiver he felt in his throat. Fanny pressed lightly against him. He stood with his head reeling and his heart dancing crazily as her arms circled his neck. Her face was raised to his.
"Just one ... Hughie. Please ... don't forget. Please hurry...."
He heard her words but they conveyed no meaning. He loved her ... he loved her. He had never been happy like this. He couldn't tell her now ... the icebox, something, was in the way. But sometime he would tell her. His arms and body felt alive.
"Oh," he thought, "Fanny, Fanny...."
Then he heard himself repeating the thought aloud. He was saying in a voice he hardly recognized, "Oh, Fanny, Fanny."
He kissed her lips.
For a moment Fanny returned his kiss passionately. Her arms clutched him tightly. She felt a curious lift in her heart, a thing she had never experienced before. It made her almost close her eyes. But she kept them open, watching furtively over Keegan's shoulder the figure of Aubrey.
Aubrey had remained bent over the plates of sandwiches. Despite the lift in her heart this annoyed her. She wanted Aubrey's attention.
"Oh," she sighed aloud. Aubrey heard. He straightened and for a moment stared at the tableau of the lovers. Fanny watching him behind Keegan's kiss saw his face grow red. Then she lowered her eyes and abandoned herself to the sensation of Keegan's arms. But the sensations faded. An interest seemed to have gone out of the situation. She pushed Keegan gently away and looked into the kitchen. Aubrey was gone.
"Oh," she whispered. Keegan looked at her dizzily. "He saw...."
"Who?"
"Aubrey Gilchrist saw you." Her face flushed.
"Did he?" Keegan leaned against the icebox. He felt weak.
"I'm sure he did," Fanny insisted, an elated note in her voice, "I'm just positive."
"He couldn't have seen much if he did, from where he was standing,"
Keegan murmured.
"I don't care anyway," Fanny smiled. Keegan felt a thrill at the words.
She loved him and didn't care who knew!
"Neither do I," he agreed. He felt glad they had been seen. It made him blush inside but he was glad.
"Oh, what do we care?" Fanny cried, "if the old stick-in-the-mud did see." Keegan reached his hands to her but she eluded him and darted into the kitchen.
"Hurry, chop the ice," she called. She was confused. For a moment she had been surprised by an emotion--a curious, unsensual desire for the awkward Keegan. She had felt her heart yield to his embrace as she usually felt her body do. But the whole thing had been for Aubrey's benefit. It had started with an intention of making Aubrey jealous by flirting with Keegan. And when Aubrey had refused to show any signs of jealousy she had carried the flirtation further until it had seemed logical to kiss and embrace Keegan as a part of her original ambition to stir Aubrey. But she had been stirred herself by the man's kiss. Yet now that Aubrey was gone she had lost all interest in Hugh. She wanted to hurry back where the novelist was.
She glanced apprehensively toward the door. Doris was standing looking at her.
"What's the matter, Dorie?"
"Mr. Ramsey has come. Mother said to set another place."
"Good heavens! What a houseful."
Doris nodded. Keegan was standing in the center of the room smiling inanely at the sink.
"I'll help you," said Doris.
8
Mrs. Basine was embarassed by the arrival of her friend Tom Ramsey. He had been a friend of her husband and a rumor had become current that he was now courting her. She denied this with indignation. To herself she admitted she liked to be alone with him. He was a sour-minded man with a liver-red face, a patrician nose and the look of a man of importance.
But he was too thin and too short to live up to this look.
In the presence of others he usually fell into a silence unless one of the two or three subjects on which he felt himself an authority came up.
These subjects were things that had to do with advertising--effective copy, effective display, prices, results. Mr. Ramsey was in the advertising business.
Mrs. Basine's embarassment at his arrival was caused by her sympathy for the man and her resentment of his weakness. She knew exactly what would happen. Tom Ramsey would sit through the evening, scrupulously polite to everyone, saying, "Yes, yes. Quite right. Oh, of course. That's absolutely right.... Indeed, I agree with you...."
For the first few minutes he would impress everyone as a man of character and intelligence. But gradually this impression would fade and people would stop talking to him and eventually ignore him altogether in the conversation.
Why this happened Mrs. Basine could never determine. But it did and it always hurt her. Mr. Ramsey, smiling exuberantly through the introduction, his thin body alive in the slightly overheated room, would in an hour become Mr. Ramsey sitting glassy-eyed and polite in a corner, his liver-red face holding with difficulty a grimace of enthusiastic attentiveness. He would make sporadic starts trying to recover something. When the talk grew boisterous and everyone was making puns and delivering himself of bouncing sarcasms, Ramsey would try to become part of the scene in a way that always startled the company. He would come to life with mysterious suddeness and hurl a jest into the common pot. His manner, however, focused attention on himself rather than his words. In back of the drollery he offered would be a desperation, in fact, sometimes a sense of fury. People would stare at him for an instant thinking, "What an odd, impossible man." And in their contemplation, forget to laugh at his remark, forget even to answer it.
And he would be left stranded in a silence--a conversational castaway. A moment later he would collapse, sit glowering in his chair, looking angrily at the carpet. This was painful to Mrs. Basine since she had grown to understand him.
When they were alone Ramsey became a different man. He talked to her usually about people he had met in her house. At such times he was master of caricature. Their absurdities, pompousness, banalities, hypocricies took grotesque outline in his words. His method was unvarying. It was based upon a crude, vicious skepticism, inspired in turn by a fanatic resentment of success in others. He seemed determined always to prove to his own and her satisfaction that despite their pretentions people were no more successful than he. His nature seemed unable to tolerate the thought of superiors. At the same time people he encountered, particularly in the Basine home, managed always to override him, to reduce him to silence, to deflate him.
He would retire into himself, protesting viciously at the injustice of this phenomenon. And while he sat in silence he would seek to wipe out the consciousness of his own inferiority by attacking with contempt the people around him. He would sit belittling and ridiculing the company to himself until he had hypnotized himself with a conviction of their general worthlessness and inferiority. Bolstered up by this treacherous conviction, he would come suddenly to life with a grotesque sense of magnitude in his mind. He was a giant among pigmies, a Socrates among clowns! Who were these numbskulls and fourflushers that they thought they were better than he was! He would show them! He would step forth and by a single gesture, a scintillant phrase, reduce them to their proper place.
And the company would find itself staring for an instant at a thin, little man with a wild look in his eyes and a snarling quiver in his voice, saying something not quite intelligible--usually an involved pun or a tardy comment on some issue under discussion. The intensity of the sullen-faced little man with the patrician nose embarrassed them for the moment. Not as much as it did Mrs. Basine whose heart would almost break at the spectacle, but enough to make them feel it were best to ignore this curious Mr. Ramsey and not let on what a fool he somehow made of himself.
Ramsey's indignation toward people, his sour skepticism of their values, was his futile way of reassuring himself of his own worth. Futile, because he had no conviction of this worth. When he sat denouncing in silence the talkers around him, ridiculing and belittling them, it was merely a less painful outlet for the contempt he had of himself.
He had been since his youth ridden by this inner feeling that he was a fool, a weakling, not quite a man. It had started in his boyhood when the nickname "Sissy" had been attached to him. His high-pitched voice, his thin body and his unboyish modesty had earned him the name. As he had grown older the fact that he did not care for girls as other youths did, and that he sometimes played with them as if he were a girl himself, had not escaped the keen, cruel eyes of his companions. The name "Sis" Ramsey had stuck.
In order to convince these companions of his masculinity he had thrown himself with violence into their roughest games. In high school he had sought to establish himself as a hardened sinner--a drinker and tough citizen. Despite his slight body he had developed into a creditable athlete. More than that he had become known as a fellow who would fight at the drop of a hat. His fiery temper became a byword.
But all these masculine, or seemingly masculine attributes were part of his effort to prove that, despite his somewhat odd voice and his equally odd indifference toward girls, he was a man. When he left high school and started in the offices of the Mackay Advertising Company, the name "Sissy" had dropped from him. He had no longer to contend with the keen, cruel eyes of boy companions. Men were content to accept him at whatever value he chose to place on himself, as far as his character was concerned.
The struggle instead of abating, however, only increased. It removed itself from the external combat of his boyhood to an internal complication, and became the basis of the feeling of inferiority which shaped his life.
This inner knowledge he cherished, that he was inferior to people, was founded on the conviction that he was impotent; or at least nearly impotent; that he could never marry and have children like other men.
His mind refused to acknowledge this fact and thus instead of finding the comparatively harmless exit of regret, it permeated his entire thought with the word--inferior ... inferior.