Page:Elmer Gantry (1927).djvu/194

 Criticism, and the genius of E. O. Excell as a composer of sacred but snappy melodies.

While he dressed, that is, while he put on the brown suit and a superior new tie, Elmer worried. This sure intimacy was too perfect. Something would interrupt it. Sharon had spoken vaguely of brothers, of high-nosed aunts and cousins, of a cloud of Falconer witnesses, and the house was large enough to secrete along its corridors a horde of relatives. Would he, at dinner, have to meet hostile relics who would stare at him and make him talk and put him down as a piece of Terwillinger provinciality? He could see the implications in their level faded eyes; he could see Sharon swayed by their scorn and delivered from such uncertain fascination as his lustiness and boldness had cast over her.

"Damn!" he said. "I'm just as good as they are!"

He came reluctantly down-stairs to the shabby, endearing drawing-room, with its whatnot of curios—a Chinese slipper, a stag carved of black walnut, a shell from Madagascar—with its jar of dried cattails, its escritoire and gate-legged table, and a friendly old couch before the white fireplace. The room, the whole spreading house, was full of whispers and creakings and dead suspicious eyes. . . . There had been no whispers and no memories in the cottage at Paris, Kansas. . . . Elmer stood wistful, a little beaten boy, his runaway hour with the daughter of the manor house ended, too worshiping to resent losing the one thing he wanted.

Then she was at the door, extremely unevangelistic, pleasantly worldly in an evening frock of black satin and gold lace. He had not known people who wore evening frocks. She held out her hand gaily to him, but it was not gaily that he went to her—meekly, rather, resolved that he would not disgrace her before the suspicious family.

They came hand in hand into the dining-room and he saw that the table was set for two only.

He almost giggled, "Thought maybe there'd be a lot of folks," but he was saved, and he did not bustle about her chair.

He said grace, at length.