Free Dangerous Days: by Mary Roberts Rinehart Page B

have to end in a debauch?”
    In the end, however, both he and Clayton went along, Clayton at least frankly anxious to keep an eye on one or two of them until they started home. He had the usual standards, of course, except for himself. A man’s private life, so long as he was not a bounder, concerned him not at all. But this had been his dinner. He meant to see it through. Once or twice he had seen real tragedy come to men as a result of the recklessness of long dinners, many toasts and the instinct to go on and make a night of it.
    Afterward they went to a midnight roof-garden, and at first it was rather dreary. Their youth was only comparative after all, and the eyes of the girls who danced and sang passed over them, to rest on boys in their twenties.
    Nolan chuckled.
    “Pathetic!” he said. “The saddest sight in the world! Every one of you here would at this moment give up everything he’s got to be under thirty.”
    “Oh, shut up!” some one said, almost savagely.
    “Of course, there are compensations,” he drawled. “At twenty you want to take the entire bunch home and keep ‘em. At thirty you know you can’t, but you still want to. At forty and over you don’t want them at all, but you think it’s damned curious they don’t want you.”
    Clayton had watched the scene with a rather weary interest. He was, indeed, trying to put himself in Graham’s place, at Graham’s age. He remembered once, at twenty, having slipped off to see “The Black Crook,” then the epitome of wickedness, and the disillusionment of seeing women in tights with their accentuated curves and hideous lack of appeal to the imagination. The caterers of such wares had learned since then. Here were soft draperies instead, laces and chiffons. The suggestion was not to the eyes but to the mind. How devilishly clever it all was.
    Perhaps there were some things he ought to discuss with Graham. He wondered how a man led up to such a thing.
    Nolan bent toward him.
    “I’ve been watching for a girl,” he said, “but I don’t see her. Last time I was here I came with Chris. She was his girl.”
    “Chris!”
    “Yes. It stumped me, at first. She came and sat with us, not a bad little thing, but - Good Lord, Clay, ignorant and not even pretty! And Chris was fastidious, in a way. I don’t understand it.”
    The ancient perplexity of a man over the sex selections of his friends puckered his forehead.
    “Damned if I understand it,” he repeated.
    A great wave of pity for Audrey Valentine surged in Clayton Spencer’s heart. She had known it, of course; that was why Chris had gone away. How long had she known it? She was protecting Chris’s name, even now. For all her frivolity, there was something rather big in Audrey. The way she had held up at her dinner, for instance - and he rather fancied that the idea of his going into the army had come from her, directly or indirectly. So Chris, from being a fugitive, was already by way of being a hero to his friends.
    Poor Audrey!
    He made a mental note to send her some flowers in the morning.
    He ordered them on his way down-town, and for some curious reason she was in his mind most of the day. Chris had been a fool to throw away a thing so worth having. Not every man had behind him a woman of Audrey’s sort.

CHAPTER VIII
    That afternoon, accompanied by a rather boyishly excited elderly clergyman, he took two hours off from the mill and purchased a new car for Doctor Haverford.
    The rector was divided between pleasure at the gift and apprehension at its cost, but Clayton, having determined to do a thing, always did it well.
    “Nonsense,” he said. “My dear man, the church has owed you this car for at least ten years. If you get half the pleasure out of using it that I’m having in presenting it to you, it will be well worth while. I only wish you’d let me endow the thing. It’s likely to cost you a small fortune.”
    Doctor Haverford insisted that he could manage that. He stood off,