id="id00052">"Anywhere you like," she answered his question.

"We'll go to the biggest, wildest, wooliest place in the city, where the band plays the most music," he announced. "Going to celebrate. Come on, honey. And then I have a fine surprise for you, as soon as we go back to the flat. Lucille won't be back till five, will she? And thank goodness for that!"

Lucille and Marjorie, pending the return of their husbands, shared a tiny flat far uptown on the west side. Marjorie had described it at length in her letters, until Francis had said that he could find his way around it if he walked in at midnight. But his intimacy with it made her feel that there was no place on earth she could call her own.

"Tell me now," she demanded.

Francis laughed again, and shook his head.

"It will do you good to guess. Come now, which—Sherry's or the Plaza or the Ritz?"

"Sherry's—they're going to close it soon, poor old place!"

"Then we'll celebrate its obsequies," said Francis, grinning cheerfully.

Before he went he had smiled, somehow, as if he had been to a very excellent college and a super-fine prep school of many traditions—as, indeed, he had—but now it was exactly the grin, Marjorie realized, still with a feeling of unworthiness, of the soldier, sailor, and marine grinning so artlessly from the War Camp Community posters. In his year of foreign service, Francis had shaken off the affectations of his years, making him, at twenty-five, a much older and more valuable man than Marjorie had parted with. But she didn't like it, or what she glimpsed of it. Whether he was gay in this simple, new way, or grave in the frighteningly old one, he was not the Francis she had built up for herself from a month's meetings and a few memories.

He smiled at her flashingly again as they settled themselves at the little table in just the right spot and place they had chosen.

"Wondering whether I'll eat with my knife?" he demanded, quite at random as it happened, but altogether too close to Marjorie's feelings to be comfortable.

She colored up to her hair.

"No—no! I know you wouldn't do that!" she asseverated so earnestly that he went off into another gale of affectionate laughter.

And then he addressed himself to the joyous task of planning a luncheon that they would never of them either forget, he said. He took the waiter into their confidence to a certain degree, and from then on a circle of silent and admiring service inclosed them.

"But you needn't think we're going to linger over it, Marjorie," he informed her. "I want to get up to where you live, and be alone with you."

"Of course," said Marjorie mechanically, saying a little prayer to the effect that she needed a great deal of help to get through this situation, and she hoped it would come in sight soon. She could not eat very much. It was all very good, and the band played ravishingly to the ears of Francis, who sent buoyantly across and demanded such tunes as he was fondest of. There was one which they played to which he sang, under his breath, a profane song which ran in part:

  "And we'll all come home
    And get drunk on ginger pop—
  For the slackers voted the country dry
    While we went over the top."

And then, when the meal was two-thirds over, Marjorie wished she hadn't offered up any prayers for help to get through the situation. Because softly up to their table strolled a tall, thin young man with a cane, gray silk gloves, and a dreamy if slightly nervous look, and said discontentedly, "Marjorie Ellison! How wonderful to find you here! You will let me sit down at your table, won't you, and meet your soldier-friend?"

If Marjorie had never written to Francis about Bradley Logan it would have been all right, quite a rescue, in fact. But in those too fatally discursive letters; the letters which had come finally to feel like a sympathetic diary with no destination, she had rather enlarged on him. He had been admiring her at disconnected intervals ever since she first met him. He had not been able to get in the army because of some mysterious neurasthenic ailment about which he preserved a hurt silence, as to details, but mentioned a good deal in a general way. It kept him from making engagements, it made him unable to go long distances; Marjorie had described all the scattered hints about it in her letters to Francis, who had promptly written back that undoubtedly the little friend had fits; and referred to him thereafter, quite without malice, as, "your fit-friend." She had an insane terror, as she introduced him, lest she should explain him to Francis in an audible aside by that name. However, it was unnecessary. Francis placed him immediately, it was to be seen, and was cold almost to rudeness. Logan did not notice it much. He sat down with them, declined the food Marjorie offered, ordered himself three slivers of dry toast and a cup of lemonless and creamless tea, and sipped them and nibbled them as if even they were a concession to manners.

What really was the matter with Logan Marjorie was doomed never to know. Francis told her afterwards, with a certain marital brevity, that it was a combination of dry toast and thinking too much about French poets. His literary affiliations, which he earned his living by, had stopped short at the naughty nineties, when everybody was very unhealthy and soulful and hinted darkly at tragedies; the period of the Yellow Book and Aubrey Beardsley and Arthur Symons and Dowson, and the last end of Wilde. He undoubtedly had the charming and fluent manners of his time, anachronism though he was. And he talked a great deal, and very brilliantly, if a bit excitedly. He plunged now, in his charming, high, slightly too mannered voice, into a discussion with Marjorie on the absolute rottenness of the modern magazine, considered from the viewpoint of style. He overwhelmed them with instances of how all magazines were owned by persons who neither had cultivation nor desired any. Francis answered him very little, so Marjorie, wifely before her time, found herself trying nervously to keep up with Logan, and hurling more thoughts at him about Baudelaire than she had known she possessed. As a matter of fact she'd never read any of him, but Logan thought she had to his dying day, which says a good deal for her brains. Presently Francis summoned the waiter in rather a martial voice, demanded a taxi of him efficiently, and Marjorie found herself swept away from Logan and taxi-ing extravagantly uptown before she knew what she was at.

Francis wasn't cross, it appeared. The first thing he did when he got her in the cab was to sweep her close to him—the second to burst into a peal of delighted laughter, and quote

  "I had a cow, a gentle cow, who browsed beside my door,
  Did not think much of Maeterlinck, and would not, furthermore!"

"Heavens!" he ended, "that fool and his magazine editors! Nobody but you could have been so patient with the poor devil, Marge."

He leaned her and himself back in the cab, and stared contemplatively out at New York going by. "And to think—and—to—think—that while half of decent humanity has been doing what it's been doing to keep the world from going to hell, that fool—that fool—has been sitting at home nibbling toast and worrying about what is style! . . . I'll tell him! Style is what I'll have when I get these clothes off, and some regular ones. You'll have to help me pick 'em out, Marge. You'll find I've no end of uses for a wife, darling."

"I hope you'll make me useful," she answered