and when I try to decide, it all gets dark in my mind.” He hesitated. “Have either one of you asked my daughter to marry him?”
“I did,” said Parrish; “three weeks ago.”
“So did I,” confessed Van Buren; “and I still have hopes that she’ll change her mind.”
Girard wondered if Jones had asked her also. Probably not; he never did anything he was expected to do. He even had the wrong name.
The phone in his hand rang shrilly and with an automatic gesture he picked up the receiver.
“Chicago calling, Mr. Girard.”
“I don’t want to talk to anybody.”
“It’s personal. It’s Mr. Jones.”
“All right,” he said, his eyes narrowing. “Put him on.”
A series of clicks—then Jones’ faintly Southern voice over the wire.
“Mr. Girard?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve been trying to get you since ten o’clock in order to apologize.”
“I should think you would!” exploded Girard. “Maybe you know you’re fired.”
“I knew I would be,” said Jones gloomily. “I guess I must be pretty dumb, Mr. Girard, but I’ll tell you the truth—I can’t have a good time when I quit work.”
“Of course you can’t!” snapped Girard. “Nobody can——” He corrected himself. “What I mean is, it isn’t an easy matter.”
There was a pause at the other end of the line.
“That’s exactly the way I feel,” came Jones’ voice regretfully. “I guess we understand each other, and there’s no use my saying any more.”
“What do you mean—we understand each other?” shouted Girard. “That’s an impertinent remark, young man. We don’t understand each other at all.”
“That’s what I meant,” amended Jones; “I don’t understand you and you don’t understand me. I don’t want to quit working, and you—you do.”
“Me quit work!” cried Girard, his face reddening. “Say, what are you talking about? Did you say I wanted to quit work?” He shook the telephone up and down violently. “Don’t talk back to me, young man! Don’t tell me I want to quit! Why—why, I’m not going to quit work at all! Do you hear that? I’m not going to quit work at all!”
The transmitter slipped from his grasp and bounced from the table to the floor. In a minute he was on his knees, groping for it wildly.
“Hello!” he cried. “Hello—hello! Say get Chicago back! I wasn’t through!”
The two young men were on their feet. He hung up the receiver and turned to them, his voice husky with emotion.
“I’ve been an idiot,” he said brokenly. “Quit work at sixty! Why—I must have been an idiot! I’m a young man still—I’ve got twenty good years in front of me! I’d like to see anybody send me home to die!”
The phone rang again and he took up the receiver with fire blazing in his eyes.
“Is this Jones? No, I want Mr. Jones; Rip Jones. He’s—he’s my partner.” There was a pause. “No, Chicago, that must be another party. I don’t know any Mrs. Jones—I want Mr.——”
He broke off and the expression on his face changed slowly. When he spoke again his husky voice had grown suddenly quiet.
“Why—why, Lola——”
— ◆ —
The Unspeakable Egg.
The Saturday Evening Post (12 July 1924)
When Fifi visited her Long Island aunts the first time she was only ten years old, but after she went back to New York the man who worked around the place said that the sand dunes would never be the same again. She had spoiled them. When she left, everything on Montauk Point seemed sad and futile and broken and old. Even the gulls wheeled about less enthusiastically, as if they missed the brown, hardy little girl with big eyes who played barefoot in the sand.
The years bleached out Fifi’s tan and turned her a pale-pink color, but she still managed to spoil many places and plans for many hopeful men. So when at last it was announced in the best newspapers that she had concentrated on a gentleman named Van Tyne everyone was rather glad that all the sadness and longing that followed in her wake should become the responsibility of one self-sacrificing individual; not better for the individual, but for Fifi’s little world very much better indeed.
The engagement was not announced on the sporting page, nor even in the help-wanted column, because Fifi’s family belonged to the Society for the Preservation of Large Fortunes; and Mr. Van Tyne was descended from the man who accidentally founded that society, back before the Civil War. It appeared on the page of great names and was illustrated by a picture of a cross-eyed young lady holding the hand of a savage gentleman with four rows of teeth. That was how their pictures came out, anyhow, and the public was pleased to know that they were ugly monsters for all their money, and everyone was satisfied all around. The society editor set up a column telling how Mrs. Van Tyne started off in the Aquitania wearing a blue traveling dress of starched felt with a round square hat to match; and so far as human events can be prophesied, Fifi was as good as married; or, as not a few young men considered, as bad as married.
“An exceptionally brilliant match,” remarked Aunt Cal on the eve of the wedding, as she sat in her house on Montauk Point and clipped the notice for the cousins in Scotland, and then she added abstractedly, “All is forgiven.”
“Why, Cal!” cried Aunt Josephine. “What do you mean when you say all is forgiven? Fifi has never injured you in any way.”
“In the past nine years she has not seen fit to visit us here at Montauk Point, though we have invited her over and over again.”
“But I don’t blame her,” said Aunt Josephine, who was only thirty-one herself. “What would a young pretty girl do down here with all this sand?”
“We like the sand, Jo.”
“But we’re old maids, Cal, with no vices except cigarettes and double-dummy mah-jongg. Now Fifi, being young, naturally likes exciting, vicious things—late hours, dice playing, all the diversions we read about in these books.”
She waved her hand vaguely.
“I don’t blame her for not coming down here. If I were in her place——”
What unnatural ambitions lurked in Aunt Jo’s head were never disclosed, for the sentence remained unfinished. The front door of the house opened in an abrupt, startled way, and a young lady walked into the room in a dress marked “Paris, France.”
“Good evening, dear ladies,” she cried, smiling radiantly
