Page:Glitter (1926).pdf/28

 wardly he typified Modern Youth; he was gay, unthinking, uncaring. Inwardly he was intensely emotional, visionary, an idealist. This made him ashamed. He was ashamed of the verse that he wrote sometimes in secret, and of the things he thought about, and of the things he enjoyed. He preferred Beethoven to Irving Berlin, Henry James to Ring Lardner, Leonardo da Vinci to Coles Phillips, Pavlowa to Gilda Gray—but such tastes would have earned the withering scorn of his contemporaries, and not for anything would he have acknowledged them.

Where girls were concerned his romanticism reached its apex. He had an Ideal, long cherished in his heart. She must be thus. And thus. He was forever seeking her, forever thinking briefly that he had found her, forever learning at last that he was wrong—that he had mistaken glitter for gold. It had been so with Molly, and with a long succession of previous Mollys, now relegated to that sorry corner of the memory where human beings pigeon-hole their disappointments.

At two o'clock in the morning Jock reached home. He entered through the kitchen door, having left his machine in the garage at the rear. "Company, Bennett?" he asked of the butler, whom he found in the act of loading a tray with sandwiches and bottles.

Bennett looked aggrieved. His expression said plainly, "Isn't there always company?" His lips said "Yes, sir."

"Who?"