Page:Glitter (1926).pdf/31

 ones feel too young, awkward, gauche; and older ones envious and faintly antagonistic.

"When's college start up again, Jock?" asked Saunders Lincoln now.

"I'm leaving tomorrow, sorry to say."

"Not anxious to get back, eh?"

"Not at all, no."

"Jock," announced Jock's mother casually, "is a liar. He's quite wild to get back, as a matter of fact. I'll bid one no trump."

This was the signal for all conversation to cease, so Jock had no opportunity to debate the point. He sprawled in his chair, sipping at a highball that had been handed him, and followed the play languidly with his glance. Presently he took a pencil and began to scribble on the back of a bridge-score. This absorbed him for some moments, after which he left the room, taking the paper with him. It was a poem to Yvonne, a poem beginning, "Oh voice that sings a song in the night, For the wind to carry forever"

Upstairs in his own quarters he read it aloud to himself. Then he said, "Punk!" rather sheepishly, and locked it away in a strong-box.

Later, when Mrs. Hamill ascended the stairs and tapped at his door, she found him stretched out across his bed in a fantastic green-and-black dressing-gown, reading Perfect Behavior by Donald Ogden Stewart. His reaction from exhibitions of sentiment on his own part was always humor on the part of others. "Makes me snap out of it," he would have said.

He grinned sociably at his mother. "Rover Boys gone home at last?"

"Yes, they've gone."

"Good game?"

"Excellent, except for Henry Barbour. The man is