Page:Jay Little - Maybe—Tomorrow.pdf/14

 hand of his pregnant wife. The loose dress was at last all he saw of her and then Joe's face came back boyish yet manly in its youthfulness.

The vision left him with an uneasy feeling of being anchorless, adrift on an unknown substance. He did not sob, or weep like ordinary boys. He cried with a despairing stridency, like an animal, bound and helpless, which is being flayed alive with stones and cannot bear its agony.

He thought of Robert Blake. It came out of itself from deep within him. And as he looked admiringly at Blake's clear image, in the back part of his mind there was just a ghost of a suspicion it wasn't quite the proper feeling he should have.

I can't help feeling this way about Bob, he thought hotly. There's nothing wrong in liking him, admiring him. I only wish I were like him.

The thoughts rocked his bewildered state even more, but with it came a languished longing. He shivered on remembering the deep bronze face, set mouth grinning. Darn, Bob had the cutest grin. No wonder everyone liked him. He was so good-looking, so friendly, so sweet, so darn good-looking. It was the sort of face that made his fingertips itch to reach up and stroke; that made his voice drop deep in his throat, murmuring ancient, wordless, wonderful things.

Dreaming of Blake now, he found himself wishing again for his friendship. It could reconstruct his whole life. He even visualized the difference but it had blurred. It was only another dream, for the barrier between them had never been scaled. He was too shy to be the aggressor, and Blake, after all these years, didn't even know he was alive.

But he could not end his thoughts of Blake abruptly. He stood as if drugged, reminiscing of times he had come into a gathering where Blake had been. Afterwards, he found that he could remember precisely what he had worn, whom he had danced with and every careless word he had said. He remembered every detail in that bronze face. It was a face he could not forget, a face he had seen and marked, one that had troubled him in many a senseless dream.

And now he thought of Robert Blake neither timidly or morosely, but as a child longs for a new toy. "Bob," he murmured, and his voice caressed the word, like a lover breathing the name of his beloved. "Oh, Bob, why don't you ask me to go out with you some night? There's 4