of him made him feel illicit. He who had never been unctuous was profuse and hearty as he urged her, "Been home all day? Well, we'll just skip out after dinner and take in a movie. Or shall we call up somebody and go see 'em? Whatever you'd like."
He heard his voice being flowery, and he hated it and knew that Leora was not cajoled. Whenever he drifted into one of his meditations on the superiority of his brand of truth to Pickerbaugh's, he snarled, "You're a fine bird to think about truth, you liar!"
He paid, in fact, an enormous price for looking at Orchid's lips, and no amount of anxiety about the price kept him from looking at them.
In early summer, two months before the outbreak of the Great War in Europe, Leora went to Wheatsylvania for a fortnight with her family. Then she spoke:
"Sandy, I'm not going to ask you any questions when I come back, but I hope you won't look as foolish as you've been looking lately. I don't think that bachelor's button, that ragweed, that lady idiot of yours is worth our quarreling. Sandy darling, I do want you to be happy, but unless I up and die on you some day, I'm not going to be hung up like an old cap. I warn you. Now about ice. I've left an order for a hundred pounds a week, and if you want to get your own dinners sometimes—"
When she had gone, nothing immediately happened, though a good deal was always about to happen. Orchid had the flapper's curiosity as to what a man was likely to do, but she was satisfied by exceedingly small thrills.
Martin swore, that morning of June, that she was a fool and a flirt, and he "hadn't the slightest intention of going near her." No! He would call on Irving Watters in the evening, or read, or have a walk with the school-clinic dentist.
But at half-past eight he was loitering toward her house.
If the elder Pickerbaughs were there— Martin could hear himself saying, "Thought I'd just drop by, Doctor, and ask you what you thought about—" Hang it! Thought about what? Pickerbaugh never thought about anything.
On the low front steps he could see Orchid. Leaning over her was a boy of twenty, one Charley, a clerk.
"Hello, Father in?" he cried, with a carelessness on which he could but pride himself.
