Free Neither Five Nor Three (Helen Macinnes) by Helen MacInnes

son.”
    “All right, darling,” Rona smiled appeasingly. “He was still the editor’s son.” And a better editor than his father, she thought. He had pulled the Clarion out of the strictly local class into a paper whose foreign news was well reported, well edited, and well read. But she couldn’t say that—not with Scott’s worried frown and tight lips to warn her. And again she wondered why Scott had ever become a reporter at all. He had been a brilliant student in economics. Why hadn’t he gone into business? It would have been easier on him if he had broken away completely into another field. Easier on him, easier on his father. That was what Jon Tyson said. Jon had a way of seeing things clearly.
    “We’ll tell Jon and Peggy on Friday,” Rona said.
    Scott looked up.
    “About the wedding,” she explained.
    “Friday,” he said. “This Friday?”
    “They are expecting us then.” She looked at him in dismay. “Don’t tell me you can’t come.” But the expression on his face answered her. She said, “Surely if you are working late so much this week, you won’t have to give up Friday too?”
    “You go and see Peggy and Jon. I’ll collect you there, later in the evening, and bring you home.”
    “All right,” she said slowly. She tried to smile. “You really are the most overworked reporter in New York. Five late nights, last week. Four, the week before. They might as well put you on the night desk.”
    “It isn’t work on Friday evening,” he said. “I forgot when Peggy asked me that I had already promised Nicholas Orpen to go to a party at his place. Don’t worry, I’ll slip away early. I’d take you with me, but—”
    “It’s men only. As usual,” she said crisply. She began to prepare to leave. She was intent on finding her gloves, on studying her face in the small mirror from her handbag, on adjusting the two roses caught in a heavy mesh of green veiling to their proper angle on her dark hair.
    “Jealous?” He was making a joke of it.
    “Perhaps.” She tried to smile, too. “But why does Nicholas Orpen always avoid women so much?” And why not let himself be called Nick? she thought.
    “Perhaps he’s afraid of women,” Scott said teasingly.
    “When I met him, he didn’t give me the feeling of being afraid of anything.”
    Scott was amused. “He’s just a very shy, quiet little man. And you only met him once, Rona, for a matter of ten minutes. Perhaps less.”
    That was quite enough, she thought. “You like him a lot, don’t you?”
    “He’s a kind-hearted sort of guy. With a good taste in music.”
    Rona said slowly, looking down at the gloves she was drawing on, “He seems to surround himself with young men.”
    “Who like music, and beer, and a lot of pipe smoke. Just trying to recapture our college days, that’s all.” Scott was laughing at himself now. Then his voice became more serious. “Orpen actually was a professor at one time, you know.”
    “I thought he was an instructor,” Rona said, trying to remember. “Why did he leave Monroe College?”
    “As far as I know—I was only a junior at the time—he didn’t get on with the president. And you know the self-appointed dictator he was.”
    “But why didn’t Orpen go on teaching elsewhere?”
    “He hadn’t a chance once the president got his claws into him. Orpen makes a living by his writing. He doesn’t ask too much of life, you know.”
    “He isn’t bitter?”
    Scott laughed. “Heavens, no. He never talks about it, anyway. He lives quietly, sees his friends occasionally.”
    All of them men, Rona was thinking. She wished she didn’t feel this sense of fear. She looked at Scott’s face—at the blue eyes, the excellent features, the finely shaped head with its fair hair waving naturally over the high brow. She closed her pocket book angrily: she was furious with herself. Jealous, she thought, jealous of a shy quiet little man she had once met when she had been walking with Scott down