It was not that Miss Penelope, or “Aunt Pea” as her nieces called her, was insensible of the advantage of a future alliance between the Kendricks and the Penningtons. But she was a spinster who knew and cared nothing for matchmaking. Her very presence was a dampener to any feelings that might have gone beyond convivial banter, With the right kind of encouragement, affection might have budded and grown, but Miss Penelope was not the one to supply a congenial atmosphere for such a development of young romance. And, too, Sarah was always there, a nice, quiet child, pretty in her way, but lacking the liveliness of her older sister—indeed, sober.

Without despairing altogether of an eventual match that would join Leon to the older Pennington girl, Deborah let it slip out of her mind for the time being, leaving it, as it were, a matter pending.

Just as Bonard had gone off to school first and set up a pattern of life which Leon later joined and became a partner to, so did Bonard return home after his studies at the Academy and set up a kind of life Leon later made himself partner to when he left the Academy and returned to Beulah Land. The two young men were friendly in a junior-senior way perfectly understood and honored by both of them, without their being real friends. The participation of each in the mild debaucheries of drinking and womanizing they practiced encouraged and excused the other.

Leon was, at least, discreet enough to take his pleasures away from Beulah Land. He never showed himself when drinking to anyone there. He was, indeed, seldom what might be called “drunk,” although both he and Bonard liked wine and whiskey and the lift and release from boredom they attained through them. They also enjoyed—not “affairs” which neither had the experience of—but relatively uncomplicated sexual relations which were found easily enough with whores. Leon was on these occasions of mild debauch a cheerful drinker and a cheerful fucker. Bonard tended to become quarrelsome if he drank beyond a certain stage, but since his belligerence never included Leon, only strangers and stray acquaintances, Leon took no special notice. Bonard had also occasionally found pleasure in rough treatment of his whores. One of them once had him barred for a time from a house she worked in because he blacked one of her eyes and so brutally savaged one of her breasts with his teeth she was unable to show herself to another customer for a fortnight.