Page:Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis.pdf/433

 savings and spend a life of independent research supported by a restricted sale of sera and of his drug.

For Terry, wifeless and valetless, this was easy enough, but for Martin it was not simple.

Martin assumed that he would resign. He explained it to Joyce. How he was to combine a town house and a Greenwich castle with flannel-shirt collaboration at Birdies' Rest he had not quite planned, but he was not going to be disloyal.

"Can you beat it! The Holy Wren fires Terry but doesn't dare touch me! I waited simply because I wanted to watch Holabird figure out what I'd do. And now—"

He was elucidating it to her in their—in her—car, on the way home from a dinner at which he had been so gaily charming to an important dowager that Joyce had crooned, "What a fool Latham Ireland was to say he couldn't be polite!"

"I'm free, by thunder at last I'm free, because I've worked up to something that's worth being free for!" he exulted.

She laid her fine hand on his, and begged, "Wait! I want to think. Please! Do be quiet a moment."

Then: "Mart, if you went on working with Mr. Wickett, you'd have to be leaving me constantly."

"Well—"

"I really don't think that would be quite nice—I mean especially now, because I fancy I'm going to have a baby."

He made a sound of surprise.

"Oh, I'm not going to do the weeping mother. And I don't know whether I'm glad or furious, though I do believe I'd like to have one baby. But it does complicate things, you know. And personally, I should be sorry if you left the Institute, which gives you a solid position, for a hole-and-corner existence. Dear, I have been fairly nice, haven't I? I really do like you, you know! I don't want you to desert me, and you would if you went off to this horrid Vermont place."

"Couldn't we get a little house near there, and spend part of the year?"

"Pos-sibly. But we ought to wait till this beastly job of bearing a Dear Little One is over, then think about it."

Martin did not resign from the Institute, and Joyce did not think about taking a house near Birdies' Rest to the extent of doing it.