Page:The Breath of Scandal (1922).djvu/331



ALE intended to sleep late into the next morning, which was Sunday, but he roused shortly after seven o'clock and remained unsatisfactorily awake, gazing at the ceiling and the walls and out the windows of his room at his club. In part, the heat and the breathlessness of the day were to blame, for little or no air was stirring above Michigan Boulevard; the emptiness of Grant Park, across the avenue, was hazy under the slanting, orange sunlight, and beyond, the deserted lake lay mirrorlike, gleaming with a long, dazzling distortion of the sun; the city seemed unnaturally hushed. The air smelled of streets; you felt about you the oppression of enormous, crowding buildings, but the streets were almost silent.

"Sunday," Hale reminded himself aloud, when he felt this; and he turned over, shut his eyes and tried to sleep again but did not; instead he only denied conscious reflection with a result that he subjected himself to a series of unsummoned memories and impressions: of Sunday morning when he had been a little boy at home; Sunday in those days meant duties and depression and fear. God knew about you, whatever you did and wherever you were and no matter whether anybody else discovered you or not, God saw and put down and punished you, exactly, justly, without a chance of your escaping him; God! Charles Hale, president of Tri-Lake Products and Materials, did not believe much in God; but Charlie Hale, who had been a little boy, had