“Right-o,” said the Admiral. “Ain’t it a pity my wife had to miss this! Why, Lucy, I haven’t had such a good time since I went dancing at the Country Club, unless it was a month ago when Rose Park gave the cocktail party for her Community Chest people. I’m gay as a lark. Aren’t you, Sonie?”

“Oh, yes, sir!” I cried. Miss Pride released us both and after she had gently closed the door behind us, switched off the ceiling light. The sun had gone behind a cloud and the library was shadowy and cold. “There now,” she said. “It’s cozy. It’s just right to have this sort of dämmerung follow a wedding. It is the anti-climax to these affairs that I like most.”

SIX

1

Philip McAllister, I was thinking, was one of those men in whom there lingers the perfectionism of childhood, who, when his stature was Lilliputian, saw the world as titanic, saw love centered in a goddess as a principle of salvation, as the meaning of that large, floating life, seeming so shapeless and so wonderful, like the shifting clouds of summer which veil and unveil the sun, that life he thought might vanish before he had sprung forth from his dwarfish body. We say of such people erroneously that they have never “grown up.” We should say instead that they grew up too quickly, skipping certain years and finding themselves flowering, alone, and in the snow, months before the spring. The phantom he had been pursuing all his life, and which he believed was at last entrapped in this girl whom he had loved intermittently for many years, had escaped him and the love with which he thought to imprison her had dematerialized, leaving him without love and without an object to try to love.