Page:Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis.pdf/442

 that it was a bad appendix, an appendix without delicacy or value.

He had loved Clif—did love him and always would. But he would never see him again. Never!

The impertinence of that flabby blackguard to sneer at Gottlieb! His boorishness! Life was too short for—

"But hang it—yes, Clif is a tough, but so am I. He's a crook, but wasn't I a crook to fake my plague figures in St. Hubert—and the worse crook because I got praise for it?"

He bobbed up to Joyce's room. She was lying in her immense four-poster, reading "Peter Whiffle."

"Darling, it was all rather dreadful, wasn't it!" she said. "He's gone?"

"Yes He's gone I've driven out the best friend I ever had—practically. I let him go, let him go off feeling that he was a rotter and a failure. It would have been decenter to have killed him. Oh, why couldn't you have been simple and jolly with him? You were so confoundedly polite! He was uneasy and unnatural, and showed up worse than he really is. He's no tougher than—he's a lot better than the financiers who cover up their stuff by being suave Poor devil! I'll bet right now Clif's tramping in the rain, saying, 'The one man I ever loved and tried to do things for has turned against me, now he's—now he has a lovely wife. What's the use of ever being decent?' he's saying Why couldn't you be simple, and chuck your highfalutin' manners for once?"

"See here! You disliked him quite as much as I did, and I will not have you blame it on me! You've grown beyond him. You that are always blaring about Facts—can't you face the fact? For once, at least, it's not my fault. You may perhaps remember, my king of men, that I had the good sense to suggest that I shouldn't appear to-night; not meet him at all."

"Oh—well—yes—gosh—but— Oh, I suppose so. Well, anyway— It's over, and that's all there is to it."

"Darling, I do understand how you feel. But isn't it good it is over! Kiss me good-night."

"But"—Martin said to himself, as he sat feeling naked and lost and homeless, in the dressing-gown of gold dragon-flies on black silk which she had bought for him in Paris—"but if it'd been Leora instead of Joyce— Leora would've known Clif was a crook, and she'd've accepted it as a fact. (Talk