Page:Firecrackers a realistic novel.pdf/19

 Vera had raked out the fiction weeklies and carried them off to her own room—but a name on the cover of one of these arrested his attention. It was the name of the author of the novel, Two on the Seine, which he had so lately discarded. He flipped the pages until he found a paper about the fellow, together with his portrait.

Cynical chap, like me, was Paul's mental comment, only harder, much harder. There's bitterness there. He sighed. It's what we all come to, I suspect. Nothing to do. Well, he writes novels; at least he has that much the better of me. And, of course, he's older. I suppose I'll look even worse at his age. Paul compared his memory of the truckman, valiant, buoyant, steaming with wet, and yet apparently excited and happy, with the face on the open page before him, but he was not able to arrive at any conclusion.

The parlour-maid had returned with the logs sheltered neatly in the curve of her arm. My God, why was everything so damned neat? Nothing dislocated, nothing tortured, just everlasting neatness! As symmetrical, his world, he surmised, as the two halves of a circle before Einstein.

I forgot to ask yoy, Jennie—he addressed the figure kneeling in front of the fireplace—what's the matter with the furnace?

She turned her pretty, smiling face in his direction—even she, he noted, was like a rubber-stamp, like a maid in a French farce or a girl on the cover