Page:Glitter (1926).pdf/34

 her son, she would be violently and utterly in love with him; hence she could sigh, at times, for girls he did not love.

He leaned his elbows on the ferry-boat's rail and contemplated New York as he approached it. He was thinking of many matters. Of Yvonne. Of college. Of that girl—young school teacher, wasn't she?—who had once slipped off the front of one such ferry as this in her car, with only ripples and a scattering of white flowers on dark Hudson waters to mark her final resting-place. "Tough," he told himself. "Tough!" Still, it had been rather an impressive way to die. . ..

The boat bumped into place at a landing, and from its capacious maw spat vehicle after vehicle into New York. Jock headed his roadster uptown. As always, the city disappointed him. When he was away fronmvit he thought only of its splendor, its magnificence, its capacity for romance and odd happenings. But when he was actually in it, as now, moving along between walls that reached upward toward infinity, the glamour was gone; and in its place there was only the stark reality of noise, and hustle, and endless faces that were never the same yet somehow always the same, hard and tired and over-painted.

Yvonne's apartment house was an imposing one on Park Avenue. Jock reached it at twelve-fifteen exactly, and having reached it, drove away again with only a momentary pause at the curb. He had decided that twelve-fifteen was too early.

Twelve-twenty-five found him at his own University Club, hailing a jovial ruddy-cheeked individual with