cottage—that’ll be the regular thing. Or thirdly for a small factory recreation house.”
Llewellyn read over the specifications.
“The last two aren’t so interesting,” he said. “Suburban cottage—that’ll be the usual thing, as you say—recreation house, no. But I’d like to have a shot at the first, sir—the store.”
Garnett nodded. “The best part is that the plan which wins each competition materializes as a building right away, and therein lies the prize. The building is yours. You design it, it’s put up for you, then you sell it and the money goes into your own pocket. Matter of six or seven thousand dollars—and there won’t be more than six or seven hundred other young architects trying.”
Llewellyn read it over again carefully.
“I like it,” he said. “I’d like to try the store.”
“Well, you’ve got a month. I wouldn’t mind it a bit, Llewellyn, if that prize came into this office.”
“I can’t promise you that.” Again Llewellyn ran his eyes over the conditions, while Garnett watched him with quiet interest.
“By the way,” he asked suddenly, “what do you do with yourself all the time, Llewellyn?”
“How do you mean, sir?”
“At night—over the week-ends. Do you ever go out?” Llewellyn hesitated.
“Well, not so much—now.”
“You mustn’t let yourself brood over this business, you know.”
“I’m not brooding.”
Mr. Garnett put his glasses carefully away in their case.
“Lucy isn’t brooding,” he said suddenly. “Her father told me that she’s trying to live just as normal a life as possible.”
Silence for a moment.
“I’m glad,” said Llewellyn in an expressionless voice.
“You must remember that you’re free as air now,” said Garnett. “You don’t want to let yourself dry up and get bitter. Lucy’s father and mother are encouraging her to have callers and go to dances—behave just as she did before.”
“Before Rudolf Rassendyll came along,” said Llewellyn grimly. He held up the pamphlet. “May I keep this, Mr. Garnett?”
“Oh, yes.” His employer’s hand gave him permission to retire. “Tell Mr. Carson that I’ve taken you off the country club for the present.”
“I can finish that too,” said Llewellyn promptly. “In fact——”
His lips shut. He had been about to remark that he was doing practically the whole thing himself anyhow.
“Well?”
“Nothing, sir. Thank you very much.”
Llewellyn withdrew, excited by his opportunity and relieved by the news of Lucy. She was herself again, so Mr. Garnett had implied; perhaps her life wasn’t so irrevocably wrecked after all. If there were men to come and see her, to take her out to dances, then there were men to care for her. He found himself vaguely pitying them—if they knew what a handful she was, the absolute impossibility of dealing with her, even of talking to her. At the thought of those desolate weeks he shivered, as though recalling a nightmare.
Back in his room that night, he experimented with a few tentative sketches. He worked late, his imagination warming to the set task, but next day the result seemed “arty” and pretentious—like a design for a tea shop. He scrawled “Ye Olde-Fashioned Butcher Shoppe—Veree Unsanitaree,” across the face of it and tore it into pieces, which he tossed into the wastebasket.
During the first weeks in August he continued his work on the plans for the country club, trusting that for the more personal venture some burst of inspiration would come to him toward the end of the allotted time. An then one day occurred an incident which he had long dreaded in the secret corners of his mind—walking home along Chestnut Street he ran unexpectedly into Lucy.
It was about five o’clock, when the crowds were thickest. Suddenly they found themselves in an eddy facing each other, and then borne along side by side as if fate had pressed into service all these swarming hundreds to throw them together.
“Why, Lucy!” he exclaimed, raising his hat automatically. She stared at him with startled eyes. A woman laden with bundles collided with her and a purse slipped from Lucy’s hand.
“Thank you very much,” she said as he retrieved it. Her voice was tense, breathless. “That’s all right. Give it to me. I have a car right here.”
Their eyes joined for a moment, cool, impersonal, and he had a vivid memory of their last meeting—of how they had stood, like this, hating each other with a cold fury.
“Are you sure I can’t help you?”
“Quite sure. Our car’s at the curb.”
She nodded quickly. Llewellyn caught a glimpse of an unfamiliar limousine and a short smiling man of forty who helped her inside.
He walked home—for the first time in weeks he was angry, excited, confused. He must get away tomorrow. It was all too recent for any such casual encounter as this; the wounds she had left on him were raw and they opened easily.
“The little fool!” he said to himself bitterly. “The selfish little fool! She thought I wanted to walk along the street with her as if nothing had ever happened. She dares to imagine that I’m made of the same flimsy stuff as herself!”
He wanted passionately to spank her, to punish her in some way like an insolent child. Until dinnertime he paced up and down in his room, going over in his mind the forlorn and useless arguments, reproaches, imprecations, furies, that had made up their short married life. He rehearsed every quarrel from its trivial genesis down to the time when a merciful exhaustion intervened and brought them, almost hysterical, into each other’s arms. A brief moment of peace—then again the senseless, miserable human battle.
“Lucy,” he heard himself saying, “listen to me. It isn’t that I want you to sit here waiting for me. It’s your hands, Lucy. Suppose you went to cooking school and burned your pretty hands. I don’t want your hands coarsened and roughened, and if you’ll just have patience till next week when my money comes in——I won’t stand it! Do you hear? I’m not going to have my wife doing that! No use of being stubborn.”
Wearily, just as he had been made weary by those arguments in reality, he dropped into a chair and reached listlessly for his drawing materials. Laying them out, he began to sketch, crumpling each one into a ball before a dozen lines marred the paper. It was her fault, he whispered to himself, it was all her fault. “If I’d been fifty years old I couldn’t have changed her.”
Yet he could not rid himself of her dark young face set sharp and cool against the August gloaming, against the hot hurrying crowds of that afternoon.
“Quite sure. Our car’s at the curb.”
Llewellyn
