Page:Firecrackers a realistic novel.pdf/15



Paul Moody permitted the book he had been attempting to read to slip from his relaxed finger-tips to the floor; his eyes wore that glazed, unseeing expression which is the outward token of vague thinking. It had been, indeed, impossible for him to invoke any interest in this novel, although, by a manifest effort, he had succeeded in turning the forty-third page. The fable, as he hazily recalled it in his chaotic reverie, dealt with a young American boy kept by a rich woman in her middle years. This relationship had been assumed some months before the episode occurred with which the story opened, a scene of sordid disillusion laid in a Paris restaurant. It had been on page forty-three that the boy began to explain to a sympathetic friend the trend of events which had led up to this situation. It was, Paul felt rather than thought, too much like life to be altogether agreeable, and he was certain that he could not entertain the idea of discovering, through the hardy means of a continued perusal, that the youth had made this compromise in order to secure release from a distasteful environment. Paul himself was sufficiently well acquainted