one thing to be thankful for,” he told himself. “My responsibility will be over before long.”
He had been sitting for a long while, looking at a blank sheet of drawing paper; but presently his pencil began to move in light strokes at the corner. He watched it idly, impersonally, as though it were a motion of his fingers imposed on him from outside. Finally he looked at the result with disapproval, scratched it out and then blocked it in again in exactly the same way.
Suddenly he chose a new pencil, picked up his ruler and made a measurement on the paper, and then another. An hour passed. The sketch took shape and outline, varied itself slightly, yielded in part to an eraser and appeared in an improved form. After two hours, he raised his head, and catching sight of his tense, absorbed face he started with surprise. There were a dozen half-smoked cigarettes in the tray beside him.
When he turned out his light at last it was half-past five. The milk wagons were rumbling through the twilit streets outside, and the first sunshine streaming pink over the roofs of the houses across the way fell upon the board which bore his night’s work. It was the plan of a suburban bungalow.
III.
As the August days passed, Llewellyn continued to think of Lucy with a certain anger and contempt. If she could accept so lightly what had happened just two months ago, he had wasted his emotion upon a girl who was essentially shallow. It cheapened his conception of her, of himself, of the whole affair. Again the idea came to him of leaving Philadelphia and making a new start farther west, but his interest in the outcome of the competition decided him to postpone his departure for a few weeks more.
The blue prints of his design were made and dispatched. Mr. Garnett cautiously refused to make any prophecies, but Llewellyn knew that everyone in the office who had seen the drawing felt a vague excitement about it. Almost literally he had drawn a bungalow in the air—a bungalow that had never been lived in before. It was neither Italian, Elizabethan, New England or California Spanish, nor a mongrel form with features from each one. Someone dubbed it the tree house, and there was a certain happiness in the label; but its charm proceeded less from any bizarre quality than from the virtuosity of the conception as a whole—an unusual length here and there, an odd, tantalizingly familiar slope of the roof, a door that was like the door to the secret places of a dream. Chauncey Garnett remarked that it was the first skyscraper he had ever seen built with one story, but he recognized that Llewellyn’s unquestionable talent had matured overnight. Except that the organizers of the competition were probably seeking something more adapted to standardization, it might have had a chance for the award.
Only Llewellyn was sure. When he was reminded that he was only twenty-one, he kept silent, knowing that, whatever his years, he would never again be twenty-one at heart. Life had betrayed him. He had squandered himself on a worthless girl and the world had punished him for it, as ruthlessly as though he had spent spiritual coin other than his own. Meeting Lucy on the street again, he passed her without a flicker of his eye—and returned to his room, his day spoiled by the sight of that young distant face, the insincere reproach of those dark haunting eyes.
A week or so later arrived a letter from New York informing him that from four hundred plans submitted the judges of the competition had chosen his for the prize. Llewellyn walked into Mr. Garnett’s office without excitement, but with a strong sense of elation, and laid the letter on his employer’s desk.
“I’m especially glad,” he said, “because before I go away I wanted to do something to justify your belief in me.”
Mr. Garnett’s face assumed an expression of concern.
“It’s this business of Lucy Wharton, isn’t it?” he demanded. “It’s still on your mind?”
“I can’t stand meeting her,” said Llewellyn. “It always makes me feel—like the devil.”
“But you ought to stay till they put up your house for you.”
“I’ll come back for that, perhaps. I want to leave tonight.”
Garnett looked at him thoughtfully.
“I don’t like to see you go away,” he said. “I’m going to tell you something I didn’t intend to tell you. Lucy needn’t worry you a bit any more—your responsibility is absolutely over.”
“Why’s that?” Llewellyn felt his heart quicken.
“She’s going to marry another man.”
“Going to marry another man!” repeated Llewellyn mechanically.
“She’s going to marry George Hemmick, who represents her father’s business in Chicago. They’re going out there to live.”
“I see.”
“The Whartons are delighted,” continued Garnett. “I think they’ve felt this thing pretty deeply—perhaps more deeply than it deserves. And I’ve been sorry all along that the brunt of it fell on you. But you’ll find the girl you really want one of these days, Llewellyn, and meanwhile the sensible thing for everyone concerned is to forget that it happened at all.”
“But I can’t forget,” said Llewellyn in strained voice. “I don’t understand what you mean by all that—you people—you and Lucy and her father and mother. First it was such a tragedy, and now it’s something to forget! First I was this vicious young man and now I’m to go ahead and find the girl I want. Lucy’s going to marry somebody and live in Chicago. Her father and mother feel fine because our elopement didn’t get in the newspapers and hurt their social position. It came out ‘all right’!”
Llewellyn stood there speechless, aghast and defeated by this manifestation of the world’s indifference. It was all about nothing—his very self-reproaches had been pointless and in vain.
“So that’s that,” he said finally in a new, hard voice. “I realize now that from beginning to end I was the only one who had any conscience in this affair after all.”
IV.
The little house, fragile yet arresting, all aglitter like a toy in its fresh coat of robin’s-egg blue, stood out delicately against the clear sky. Set upon new-laid sod between two other bungalows, it swung the eye sharply toward itself, held your glance for a moment, then turned up the corners of your lips with the sort of smile reserved for children. Something went on in it, you imagined; something charming and not quite real. Perhaps the whole front opened up like the front of a doll’s house; you were tempted to hunt for the catch because you felt an irresistible inclination to peer inside.
Long before the arrival of Llewellyn Clark and Mr. Garnett a small crowd had gathered—the constant efforts of two policemen were required to keep people from breaking through the strong fence and trampling the tiny garden. When Llewellyn’s eye first fell upon it, as their car rounded a corner, a lump rose in his throat. That was his own—something that had come alive out of his mind. Suddenly he realized that it was not for sale, that he wanted it more than anything in the world. It could mean to him what love might have meant, something always bright and warm where he could rest from whatever disappointments life might have in store. And unlike love, it would set no traps for him. His career opened up before him in a shining path and for the first time in months he was radiantly happy.
The speeches, the congratulations, passed in a daze. When he got up to make a stumbling but grateful acknowledgment, even the sight of Lucy standing close to another man on the edge of
