arly
days in the metropolis.

But George found everything flat and stale. He did the things he had
always done, hunted up the friends he had always known. He spent
weekends at various country places, and came always back to town with
an undiminished sense of his need of Becky, and his need of revenge on
Randy.

He had heard before he left Virginia that Becky was at Nantucket. He
had found some consolation in the fact that she was not at
Huntersfield. To have thought of her with Randy in the old garden, on
Pavilion Hill, in the Bird Room, would have been unbearable.

He had a feeling that, in a sense, Madge's marriage was a desertion.
He did not in the least want to marry her, but there were moments when
he needed her friendship very much. He needed it now. And she was
going to marry Major Prime, and go out to some God-forsaken place, and
get fat and lose her beauty. He wished that she would not talk about
such things--it made him feel old, and worried about his waist-line.

Even Oscar was failing him. "When Flora gets well," the little man
kept telling him, "we are going to do some good with our money. We
have done nothing but think of ourselves----"

"Oh, for Heaven's sake, don't preach," George exploded. It seemed to
him that the world had gone mad on the subject of reforms. Man was no
longer master of his fate. The time would come when the world would be
a dry desert, without a cocktail or a highball for a thirsty soul, and
all because a lot of people had been feeling for some time as Flora and
Oscar felt at this moment.

"I shall take Flora up to the Crossing in a few days," Oscar was
saying; "the doctor thinks the sea air will do her good. I wish you
would come with us."

George had no idea of going with Oscar and Flora. He had been marooned
long enough with a sick woman and her depressed spouse. When Flora was
better and she and Oscar got over their mood of piety and repentance,
he would be glad to join them. In the meantime he searched his mind
for some reasonable excuse.

"Look here," he said, "I'll join you later, Oscar. I've promised some
friends at Nantucket that I'll come down for the hunting."

"I didn't know that you had friends in Nantucket," Oscar told him
moodily.

"The Merediths," George remembered in the nick of time the name of
Becky's grandfather. Oscar would not know the difference.

Having committed himself, his spirits soared. It had, he felt, been an
inspiration