ote implied--he had had a whimsical
superstition that it must succeed because he was playing property man to
it after his own appearance as Romeo had failed--but he knew Ted and
the two years' fight against the struggling nervous restlessness and
discontent with everything that didn't have either speed or danger in
it that the latter, like so many in his position, had had to make. His
mouth tightened--no girl on earth, even Nancy, could realize exactly
what that meant--the battle to recover steadiness and temperance and
sanity in a temperament that was in spite of its poised externals
most brilliantly sensitive, most leapingly responsive to all strong
stimuli--a temperament moreover that the war and the armistice between
them had turned wholly toward the stimuli of fever--and Ted had made
it with neither bravado nor bluster and without any particular sense
of doing very much--and now this girl was going to smash it and him
together as if she were doing nothing more important than playing with
jackstones.

He remembered a crowd of them talking over suicide one snowy night up
in Coblenz--young talk enough but Ted had been the only one who really
meant it--he had got quite vehement on picking up your proper cue for
exit when you knew that your part was through or you were tired of the
part. He remembered cafe hangers-on in Paris--college men--men who could
talk or write or teach or do any one of a dozen things--but men who had
crumbled with intention or without it under the strain of the war
and the snatches of easy living to excess, and now had about them in
everything they said or wore a faint air of mildew; men who stayed in
Paris on small useless jobs while their linen and their language verged
more and more toward the soiled second-hand--who were always meaning to
go home but never went. If Ted went to Paris--with his present mind. Why
Ted was his best friend, Oliver realized with a little queer shock in
his mind--it was something they had never just happened to say that way.
And therefore. Far be it from Oliver to be rude to the daughter of his
hostess, but some things were going to be explained to Miss Elinor Piper
if they had to be explained by a public spanking in the middle of the
Jacobean front hall.

But then there was breakfast, at which few girls appeared, and Elinor
was not one of the few. And then Peter insisted on going for a swim
before lunch--and then lunch with Elinor at the other end of the table
and