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Back The Fall of Valor Save as PDF
Chapters (51)
  1. Introduction by Michael Bronski
  2. BEGINNING
  3. II
  4. III
  5. IV
  6. V
  7. VI
  8. VII
  9. VIII
  10. IX
  11. X
  12. XI
  13. XII
  14. XIII
  15. MIDDLE
  16. II
  17. III
  18. IV
  19. V
  20. VI
  21. VII
  22. VIII
  23. IX
  24. X
  25. XI
  26. XII
  27. XIII
  28. XIV
  29. XV
  30. XVI
  31. XVII
  32. XVIII
  33. XIX
  34. XX
  35. END
  36. II
  37. III
  38. IV
  39. V
  40. VI
  41. VII
  42. VIII
  43. IX
  44. X
  45. XI
  46. XII
  47. XIII
  48. XIV
  49. XV
  50. XVI
  51. About the Author

She turned back to the glass, gave a last look at her hair, and fastened a plain gold chain around her neck. She wished it were longer, wished it hung lower in a longer oval, so that it didn’t make her face look so round. She looked at the effect in the mirror, and then, staring at her reflection, again lost herself in her thoughts.

XII

XII

The dining room was large, bare, unattractive, with thin pillars upholding a sagging ceiling. It reminded him of some dim Sunday-­school room out of his childhood: he could see the pillars festooned with holly and tinsel, hear each tinny note of the flat pitch-­black piano. . . . Now through the room from the hall came the tinkling notes of Beautiful Dreamer which was being played on a harp in the parlor beyond the lobby. Down at one end of the long room were the Howards, chatting busily together; and a few tables away sat a yellow-­haired young man and his mother. Ethel appeared in the doorway, looked in uncertainly, and then found their table. As she came across the room he admired her walk: it was straight, confident, cool, the walk of a young woman.

“You look very nice,” he said.

“Thank you.”

“I like that dress.” He unfolded his napkin. “There seems to be some kind of recital going on, a harp.”

“Yes.”

“After dinner would you care to go in, for a while, and listen?”

“Not tonight.”

The wide still room continued to evoke its associations out of the past; he had only to close his eyes to feel himself back in the Boys’ Carving and Weaving Class that met on Friday nights. It was the second time in the past hour that he had had intimations of childhood. First there had been the memory of the childhood dream that had sprung unbidden to his mind as they were leaving the steamer; now, the sense of being in the old Sunday-school room. What brought these images up? he wondered. The pending showdown with Ethel—his feeling of being on trial, so to speak—which inevitably reduced him to something less than adult status? Or was it, possibly, the influence of the Marine captain still, in whose presence he had experienced stirrings of an old adolescence?

A middle-­aged woman with heavy black eyebrows and lavender hair, wearing beach pajamas, sandals, and long drop-­earrings, came forward and introduced herself as Miss Fly, the hostess. She launched at once into a long one-­sided conversation, with an incessant running fire of comment as if she had an anxiety that she would be interrupted—which, it turned out, was the case; for Miss Fly was deaf as a post and lived in fear of being found out.