Page:The Breath of Scandal (1922).djvu/89

 by this district, was becoming more and more popular; the old-fashioned "home" with sober duties and ideals was amazingly less so. If he thought at all of the transition stage, he had supposed it to be easy enough and natural,—merely a matter of choice for any individual as to how he preferred to live. For nothing had ever happened to Gregg to force him to feel anything else. But here, in this room where Marjorie's father had been shot and where a few minutes ago he had had to stand by and watch her learn "it," suddenly he revolted with savage aversion to these great indulgent buildings in such opposition to Marjorie's home and to his own, where he had been happy as a boy. He hated these places because they had hurt him and had hurt Marjorie so.

Yet he was aware that, in the great number of these rooms about, lived people who were married; right next door here was Nyman with his wife and their baby. The strange circumstance was that Gregg did not distinguish such neighbors as wholly different, in their relationship with each other, from Charles Hale and Sybil Russell. Gregg could not then figure out how or why; the simple fact was that he did not feel it.

It was partly this, perhaps, which held him from casting upon Sybil Russell that accusation of personal infamy which Billy had flung upon her. He thought that if she had never existed, in her place on that piano bench near the spot where Charles Hale had been shot, would be sitting some other young woman who represented to Marjorie's father the passion and the escape from duty and responsibilities which had drawn Charles Hale to this place. For to have his share in the life about here—the young, new, reckless independence