Weekly Meredy.com E-book - Dodsworth - Part Two

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CHAPTER 19


Thomas J. Pearson and Samuel Dodsworth had always been too well acquainted to know each other. They had been together since boyhood. Each was a
habit to the other. It had been a habit for Tub to go once a week to Sam's for poker; a habit for Sam to telephone him for lunch every Tuesday or
Wednesday. They analyzed each other, they considered each other as individuals, no more than a man considers the virtues of his own several toes,
unless they hurt. Even Sam's absence from Tub at technical school, after college, had given them no understanding of each other. They were under
the spell of the collegiate belief that one's classmates are the most princely fellows ever known in history.

But in Sam's six months abroad, Tub had grown into new habits. It was to the house of Dr. Henry Hazzard that Tub looked now for his weekly drug
of poker. Sam saw that Hazzard was at least as necessary to Tub as himself, now, and sometimes he found himself allied against the two of them
when the talk fell on labor or European alliances and they expressed the fat opinions which Sam himself had once accepted but about which he now
felt shaky. He was slightly jealous, slightly critical. He noted that Tub wasn't quite so perfect as he had remembered. When Tub shrieked, during
a game of poker, "'What ho' said the cat to the catamaran" or "Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the ante" Sam was not
diverted. And he felt that Tub was as critical of him. If he hinted that the paving on Conklin Avenue was bad, or that the coffee at the country
club left something to be desired, Tub scolded, "Oh, God, we expatriates certainly are a hard bunch to please!"

When Sam dined with them, he found himself turning oftener to Tub's bouncing goodwife, Matey, than to Tub.

Yet between times they played their nineteen holes happily, serene as a pair of old dogs out rabbit-hunting. If sometimes Sam found himself
wishing for Ross Ireland's melodramatic talk about revolutions and lost temples, if sometimes Tub seemed rather provincial, Sam was thoroughly
scandalized, and rebuked himself, "Tub's the best fellow in the world!"

It is doubtful whether he was the more disturbed by finding that he could get along without Tub or by finding that Tub could get along without
him.

Believing from Sam's first enthusiastic foreign letters that he would not return from Europe this year, Tub had planned with Dr. Hazzard a
month's motoring-golfing expedition. They were excited about it. They were going to play over the best courses in Winnemac, Indiana, Illinois,
Michigan, and Ohio. They spoke of the charms of stumbling over new varieties of bunkers, wild grass, and rosebushes. They raved over long shots
across sand dunes, and disastrous ponds in which to lose dozens of golf balls.

They had planned to go by themselves, but now they invited Sam. He hesitated. He felt unwanted.

Of course they hadn't known he would be returning--

Of course they HAD urged him to come--

Only why couldn't they have waited to see whether he would return?

He compromised by going with them for two weeks out of the month.

It was a good jaunt. They laughed, and felt free of womenfolk and nagging secretaries, retold all the dirty stories they knew, drank discreetly,
drove fast, and admired the golf courses on the North Shore, above Chicago. Sam enjoyed it. But he noted that when he left they seemed cheerful
enough about going on by themselves.

Brent--Emily--business--now Tub and Hazzard--they didn't need him.



All thinking about matters less immediate than food, sex, business, and the security of one's children is a disease, and Sam was catching it. It
made everything more difficult.

He thought about alcohol.

He noted that most of the men of the country club set, including himself, drank too much. And they talked too much about drinking too much.
Prohibition had turned drinking from an agreeable, not very important accompaniment to gossip into a craze. They were jumpy about it, and as
fascinated as a schoolboy peering at obscene posters.

And he began to meditate about his acquaintances, almost frankly.

He realized, almost frankly, that he was not satisfied now by Dr. Hazzard's best limericks, Tub's inside explanations about the finances of
Zenith corporations, even Judge Turpin's whispers about the ashes upon the domestic hearths of their acquaintances.

Hang it, that HAD been good talk in Paris, even when he had not altogether understood it--Atkins' rumination on painters, the gilded chatter of
Renee de Penable's gang of pirates, and still more the stories of Ross Ireland. He had heard of Anastasia, who was declared to be the daughter of
the Czar, of the Zinovieff letter which had wrecked the Labor Party of Britain, of the suicide of Archduke Rudolph, of the Empress Charlotte
wandering melancholy mad through the haunted rooms of Castle Miramar, of systems to win at Monte Carlo, of Floyd Gibbons' plan to make a motor
road from Tierra del Fuego to the Rio Grande, of Turkish women born in harems who now bobbed their hair and studied biology, of the Chinese
"Christian general"--oh, a hundred stories touching great empires and hidden lands. And he had seen the King and Queen of England drive up
Constitution Hill in an open motor, had seen Carpentier, the prize-fighter, dancing--a pale, solemn, unathletic-looking young man, seen Briand at
the opera and Arnold Bennett at the theater.

It had been good talk and good seeing.

But even if he were articulate enough to bring home this booty to Tub and Dr. Hazzard and Judge Turpin, he felt--after a few stumbling trials he
knew--that they would not be interested.

He saw that it was not a question of Ross Ireland being interested in kingdoms and of Tub being interested only in coupons and aces. He saw,
slowly, that none of his prosperous industrialized friends in Zenith were very much interested in anything whatever. They had cultivated caution
until they had lost the power to be interested. They were like old surly farmers. The things over which they were most exclamatory--money, golf,
drinking--didn't fascinate them as brush-strokes or wood-winds fascinated the peering Endicott Everett Atkins; these diversions were to the lords
of Zenith not pleasures but ways of keeping so busy that they would not admit how bored they were, how empty their ambitions. They had as their
politics only a testy fear of the working class. (Why, Sam perceived uneasily, the whole country turned the dramatic game of politics over to a
few seedy professional vote-wanglers!) To them, women were only bedmates, housekeepers, producers of heirs, and a home audience that could not
escape, and had to listen when everybody at the office was tired of hearing one's grievances. The arts, to them, consisted only of jazz conducive
to dancing with young girls, pictures which made a house look rich, and stories which were narcotics to make them forget the tedium of existence.

They did things, they rushed, they supervised, they contended--but they were not interested.

However difficult Fran might be at times, pondered Sam, however foolish Madame de Penable with her false hair and her false gigolos, however
pompous and patronizing Mr. Endicott Everett Atkins, they were fascinated by everything in human life, from their own amours to soup and
aeroplanes.

He would like to be one of them. There was only one thing in the way. Could he?

Thus meditated Samuel Dodsworth, alone on the porch of the country club, awaiting the return of Tub Pearson.

What the devil was he doing here? He was as dead as though he were entombed. He had to "get busy"--either go back to work, at once, or join Fran.

Which?

Then, for a week or two, he became very busy peering into the Sans Souci Gardens development.



To the north of Zenith, among wooded hills above the Chaloosa River, there was being laid out one of the astonishing suburbs which have appeared
in America since 1910. So far as possible, the builders kept the beauties of forest and hills and river; the roads were not to be broad straight
gashes butting their way through hills, but winding byways, very inviting . . . if one could only kill off the motorists. Here, masked among
trees and gardens, were springing up astonishing houses--considerably more desirable as residences than the gaunt fortified castles of the Rhine,
the magnificent and quite untenantable museums of French chateaux. They were all imitative, of course--Italian villas and Spanish patios and
Tyrolean inns and Tudor manor-houses and Dutch Colonial farmhouses, so mingled and crowding one another that the observer was dizzy. They were so
imitative and so standardized that it was easy to laugh at them. But they were no more imitative of Munich than was Munich of Italy or than Italy
of Greece, and like the rest of the great American Domestic Architecture of this era, they were probably the most comfortable residences in the
world . . . for one who didn't mind it if his Venetian balcony was only ten feet from his neighbor's Swiss chalet, and if his neighbor's washing
got slightly in the way of tea on his own lawn.

Driving through the San Souci Gardens, Sam was fascinated. He liked the energy with which roads were being dug, houses rising, stone fountains
from Florence being set up in squares and circles designated by arty little swinging street signs as "Piazza Santa Lucia" and "Assisi Crescent"
and "Plaza Real."

That there was something slightly ridiculous about mixing up Spain and Devon and Norway and Algiers, and transplanting them to the sandy hills of
a Midwestern town, where of late the Indians had trapped rabbits and the rusty-bearded Yankees had trapped the Indians, did vaguely occur to Sam,
but it was all a fantastic play to him, very gay and bright after the solemn respectabilities and the disapproving mansard roofs of the older
residential avenues in Zenith.

Here, at least, he reflected, was all the color and irregularity he had gone abroad to seek; all the scarlets and yellows and frivolous pinks,
all the twisty iron-work and scalloped tiles and striped awnings and Sicilian wine-jars he could swallow, along with (he thanked Heaven) all the
mass-produced American electric refrigerators, oil furnaces, vacuum cleaners, garbage incinerators, over-stuffed chairs and built-in garages
which, for all of Fran's scoffing and Mr. Atkins' expatriate distress, Sam still approved.

It came to him that now there was but little pioneering in manufacturing motors; that he hadn't much desire to fling out more cars on the packed
highways. To create houses, perhaps less Coney-Island-like than these--noble houses that would last three hundred years, and not be scrapped in a
year, as cars were--

"That'd be interesting," said Sam Dodsworth, the builder. Of course he knew nothing about architecture. But he knew a good deal about
engineering, about steel and wood and glass, about organizing companies, about getting along with labor.

"And say! Here's something that Fran would take an interest in! And she's an expert about decorations and all that stuff. . . . Might hold her
here!"

In a leisurely way, apparently not much interested, Sam saw to it that he was introduced to the president of the Sans Souci Company and that they
played golf together. He was invited to view the Gardens with the president, and afterward he spent a good deal of time walking through them,
talking to architects, to carpenters, to gardeners. Otherwise he merely waited.

He was very good at waiting.



Twice a week letters from Fran had drawn him toward her and toward Europe. Her first letter had come on the day of his arrival in Zenith:


Villa Doree, Vevey, Montreux, La Suisse.

SAM DEAR, it's TOO glorious! Down the lake, the friendliest little steamers zipping by--peaks of the Dent de Midi--too perfectly SUPERB--at
sunset they're clouds of gold. And I've actually been walking! (Was Fran terribly bad in Paris, always galloping out to night clubs when you'd
rather have gone walking? Well, you have your revenge--AWFULLY lonely for your big bear growls and general dependability even though I am moved
by beauty of this place and rather grateful for a little calm.) Walk up through vineyards to ducky little stone houses.

The villa is CHARMING--not much ground but lawns and roses and terrace for tea, right on the lake. Renee de Penable is just as glad as I am to be
free for a while of all the noisy young dancing men. We've both sworn to let ourselves be old ladies with caps and knitting for a while, probably
take to religion and camomile tea. I'm waiting for your letters, just had your steamer note, SO glad you enjoyed crossing with Mr. Ireland, you
probably had much more fun with him than with a bad sport like me--shouldn't have said that, looks mean, and I really and truly am glad you had a
nice bachelorish time. Be sure and write EVERYTHING about Brent and Emily and McKee. Give my regards to Tub and Dr. Hazzard. An astonishing big
gull has just lighted on the lawn right in front of the window by which I write. We have the funniest pair of maids--one looks like a kewpie, and
I suspect the purity of her intentions toward the postman, and cook is built like a Japanese wrestler--only more clothed, of course. I hope you
will have a happy stay in Zenith. I do miss you. Come back soon and in early autumn we'll jaunt off together. I know you're a little fed up with
Paris and personally I don't care if we don't get back there till spring, we might view Egypt, Italy, etc., for six months. Renee sends you her
love and so do I, old grizzly!

Your FRAN.


Her next three letters were short, devoted to scenery and troubles. She always had troubles--always. They weren't very serious troubles, he
thought: Renee had been cross, the cook had been cross--apparently Fran herself had never been cross. The dance at the Hotel des Deux Mondes had
been a bore, the rain had been wet, the English family next door had been rude, she had a toothache. Two of the letters were impersonal, almost
chilling; in between was an affectionate cry for him, so that he was confused and gave a good deal of his hours of meditation to wishing that she
were a little less complicated.

The fourth letter was livelier:


Wouldn't you KNOW it, Sam! After swearing that she never wanted to see a dancing man again, or anything in the way of a male more disturbing than
a Father Confessor, Renee has already gathered about her (which unfortunately means more or less about me too) a brand-new horde of Apollos. How
she does it _I_ don't know! There'll be a nice young man of sixty staying with his venerable mamma at a hotel here; somebody in Paris asks him to
call on us; he comes formally to tea; and the next day he's panting on the doorstep again, bringing a pack of males ranging from sixteen to
eighty and from racing models to the latest thing in hearses. Of course she knows simply EVERYBODY--we can't go to the Deux Mondes for a cocktail
without at least one gent swooping down on her with glad whoops of alcoholic welcome. So now the house is littered with fauns and Bacchuses, if
that's the word.

There's an English hunting man named Randall who wears blue collars and shirts, and another Englishman picturesquely named Smith, and an Austrian
baron who, as far as I can find out, sells clocks, and a man who seems to have leased the French Bourse, and a rich American Jew named Arnold
Israel--he's about forty and very good-looking in a black-haired, black-eyed, beefy sort of way but a little too gaudily Oriental for my simple
taste, when he kisses your hand he almost bites it, ugh! Of course it is nice to be able to dance again, but I really and truly did enjoy just
mouching around and being quiet. Would you mind transferring five thousand (dollars) to my account at the Guaranty, Paris? Food here is more
expensive than I had expected, and I've had to buy some more summer things--I found a shop in Montreux with simply DARLING hats, and while it's
all very well to walk and to study the dear sweet smelly Common People by riding on trains, now that Renee has gone and dragged us into the Life
Idiotic again we've had to hire a limousine and a chauffeur. I hope you're ever so happy, darling.

FRAN.


It was with her next letter that he began to fret. It reached him while he was motoring and golfing with Tub Pearson and Dr. Hazzard:


Such a lovely blue and golden day! The mountains are like the pillars of heaven. A bunch of us are taking a motor boat across to the French side
of the lake. Arnold--Arnold Israel, an American here, I think I spoke of him--he has discovered a marvelous little inn where we can lunch--under
the vine and fig tree sort of thing. He's really an awfully nice person, one of these extraordinary international Jews who can do everything and
knows everything--rides like an angel, swims seven miles, tells the funniest living stories, knows more about painting than old Atkins and more
about biology and psychology than sixteen college professors and I must say he dances like Maurice himself! And he is an American. It's funny, I
know I'm playing into your hands but I must admit this, much though I admire Europeans, it IS nice to rest one's self after even Renee's best
cut-glass wit, etc., etc., by being simple and natural with a fellow countryman--one who will UNDERSTAND when you say, "She must have gotten that
hat from the five and ten cent store," or even, "Attaboy." I find that with you away, you dear darling old vulgarian, I have positive joy in
hearing somebody say, "Oh, hell." Makes me almost homesick. Oh yes, I guess I am American all right! Must hurry now, lots of love,

F.


For ten days, no letter, then two together:


You would approve of your bad Fran thoroughly if you knew what a healthful life she is leading. Of course sometimes I do stay up a bit late at
dances--we've met an awfully nice American Jewish family here named, of all things, Lee, friends of Arnold Israel--they have rented a wonderful
old castle back from the lake above Glion, and they do give the most gorgeous parties. But otherwise I'm outdoors most of the time--riding,
swimming, tramping, motoring, tennis--the Israel man has the most terrific cannon-ball in tennis. And then he'll read Shelley aloud, like a
twenty-year-old Vassar girl! What a man! And to think that he's in the jute and hemp importing business! though it's true that he merely
inherited the business from his hustling old father, and that he's able to leave it four or five months every year and loaf all through Europe.

Good Heavens, this whole letter seems to be about Arnold Israel! That's only because I thought he was the person here who would interest you
most. I needn't tell you that he and I are merely the most impersonal kind of friends. Oh, I suppose he would get sentimental if I'd let him but
I most certainly will not, and with all his Maharajah splendors, he has the most delicate and sensitive mind. I do appreciate what you say about
Brent and Emily's having really grown up and hardly needing us. Madly though I adore them and long to see them, I'm almost afraid to, they'd make
me feel so old, whereas now if you could see me in white blouse, shamelessly crimson skirt, white shoes and stockings, you would say I'm a
flapper, and it's beautifully quiet here by the lake at night-getting in QUANTITIES of restful sleep.

Your FRAN.


Sam dear, this isn't really a letter but just a PS. to my note of yesterday. I feel as though I wrote so much about Mr. Israel that you'll think
I think too much about him. That's the unfortunate thing about letters--one just chats along and often gives a wrong impression. If I have
mentioned him several times it's only because most of the other people, no matter how well they may dance or swim, are really pretty dull, while
he is a nice person to talk to, and of course--I needn't tell you, you old loyal darling, I have no other interest in him. Besides, Renee is
crazy about him and wants to annex him for keeps, and as she's really the chef de bureau here, having found the villa, etc., even though she does
pay only half the rent, if she wants her old Arnold she can certainly jolly well have him, for all I care. Hastily, F.


The next letter did not come for nearly a fortnight, and Sam realized, putting on his glasses to peer at the stamp, that it was not from Vevey,
but from Stresa, in Italy:


Sam, the most dreadful thing has happened. Madame de Penable and I had simply the most dreadful row, she said things I simply could not forgive,
and I have left the villa and come here to Lake Maggiore. It's a lovely place, but as I don't know whether I shall stay, you'd better address me
c/o Guaranty, Paris. And it was all about nothing.

I've written you about a Mr. Israel we met at Vevey and how crazy Renee was about him. One evening, I hate to say this about a woman who, after
all, no matter how vulgar and unscrupulous she is has given me a good time, but I really must say she'd drunk more than was good for her and
after the guests had gone she suddenly turned on me like a fishwife and she used the most DREADFUL language and she accused me of carrying on an
affair with Mr. Israel and of stealing him from her which was idiotic as well as false because I must say she never did have him so how could I
have stolen him from her even supposing I had the slightest desire to! I've never had anybody talk to me the way she did, it was simply DREADFUL!

Of course I didn't condescend to stoop to her level and answer her, I simply said very politely, "My dear Madame de Penable, I'm afraid you are
hysterical and not altogether responsible for what you are saying and I would prefer not to discuss the matter any further certainly not till
tomorrow morning." But that didn't stop her and finally I simply went to my room and locked the door and next day I moved to a hotel and then
came down here--it really is lovely here, with the Borromean Isles including the famous Isola Bella lying out in the lake and across the lake,
behind the nice village of Pallanza, the mountains rising, quite high and villages, etc., strung along the roads up the mountains. I feel awfully
lonely here and that beastly toothache I had in London is returning but, after all, anything is better than living with a brawling vulgar fool
like Mme. de Penable.

I hate to 'fess up and I guess this gives you a lovely chance to crow over me, only I know you're too generous and understanding of your bad
little girl to take such an advantage of her, but you certainly were completely right in what you said, or rather hinted, for you were too kind
to come out and say anything rude, about the Penable woman and her dreadful vulgar friends. I'm sorry. I hope I've learned something. Only I
don't want you to think that Mr. Israel is in any way to blame, like the Penable woman and her friends.

He was as innocent as I was, and he was good enough to see me off on the train at Vevey. He is a man I would like to have you meet, I think you
would find in him all the nice, jolly, companionable, witty things you find in Ross Ireland and at the same time a subtlety and good taste that
I'm sure you will admit with all his fine qualities Mr. Ireland lacks. Well, perhaps we will run into Arnold when you come back for I believe he
is taking a whole year this time wandering around Europe.

Oh, do come soon, darling! I miss you so today! If you were here we'd take the little batello--aren't you proud of me, I've already learned ten
words of Italian in one day; "Come in" is avanti and the bill is le conto or no, il conto I think it is--and we'd go scooting around the lake. If
it's convenient you might send another couple of thousand, Guaranty Paris--of course I have to pay my share of the rent at the cursed villa at
Vevey even though I'm not there. I suppose if I didn't, and I certainly would jolly well like not to, the De Penable woman would go around saying
that I was not only a libertine and a man-snatcher but also an embezzler!

How I'd like to have you spank her for me with your big beautiful strong hand! You'd do it so calmly and so thoroughly! So of course I have to
pay my share of the rent and limousine hire there and as I also have to pay now for my rooms here or wherever I may be (you better not depend on
this address reaching me but address c/o Guaranty) it will make things a little more expensive than I had hoped. Oh, dear, I did hope this would
be a nice economical summer, and heaven knows I tried hard enough to make it so, but I didn't expect the unexpected to unexpect quite so
disastrously. I feel better now after talking to you like this--I cried almost all last night--and I shall now live the life of a nun and devote
myself to the study of the Italian language and people, as befits an old lady like me.

Your rumpled and repentant Fran.


That letter had come on the day when the president of the Sans Souci Gardens Company had invited Sam to lunch.

He was very frank, the president. He was a trained architect. He astonished Sam by admitting that he thought Sans Souci rather dreadful.

"There's too much mixture of styles, and the houses are too close together," he said. "But most Americans, while they'll pay a devil of a lot for
a big impressive house, don't care enough for privacy so that they'll pay for a decent-sized plot of ground. And they WANT French chateaux in a
Henry Ford section! But at least we've been educating them to be willing to come out toward the country instead of huddling together in the city.
And I'm planning now, if Sans Souci doesn't ruin me, a much bigger development where we won't mix the styles. Oh, I suppose we'll have to go on
cribbing from Europe and Colonial America. When a natural genius comes along and creates something absolutely new in houses, only a few people
really like 'em. But I picture a new development--I hope with a less agonizing name than Sans Souci Gardens, which is the invention of that grand
old Frenchman, one of my partners, Mr. Abe Blumenthal--in which, at least, we can keep the thing from looking like a world's fair. For instance,
one section strictly confined to houses more or less in the Tudor style, and another all Dutch Colonial, or something not warring with Dutch
Colonial. Or maybe the whole development in one style. Like Forest Hills on Long Island."

But--the Sans Souci president went on--he himself was too fanciful and too impatient. And as partner he needed some one (he hinted that it might
be Sam) who would take the hundred or so notions for hotels and luxurious yachting tours and chain restaurants which he conceived every month,
pick out the most practical, and control the financing, the selling.

He grinned. "Doesn't sound like much of an offer. It's based on the belief that I do have some new and interesting ideas along with quite a
decent knowledge of architecture and building. But--I'd like to see if it isn't possible for us to get together. While you'd been deciding that
you were bored with selling cars and while you've been looking up my record for dependability--"

"Oh, you guessed that?" grunted Sam.

"Of course!"

"I'll think it over, I most certainly will," said Sam.

He returned to the country club, planning a dozen or so new kinds of real estate developments of his own, to receive Fran's distressed letter
from Stresa.

It all seemed to fit in. He would bring her back; together they would look into the building of houses. He cabled her, "Too bad penable glad got
rid her why don't you return zenith then abroad again in year or so."

She answered, "No want stay few more months suit self about joining."

And the great Samuel Dodsworth still had no more notion of what he was going to do than when, as a senior in college, he had sat on East Rock,
looking at Long Island Sound, planning to be a bridge-builder in the Andes.



He wrote to her of the Sans Souci Gardens, and waited. He read about domestic architecture, and went to Cleveland and Detroit to inspect new
developments.

Her next letter had been written some days before he had received her Stresa letter, before she had his cable. It informed him:


Yes, my dear Samivel, I am still at Stresa, though I may be off to Deauville immejit--I've always wanted to see one of those places where gloomy
earls go to lose money at chemin de fer. But meantime I've been very happy here, after getting over my first hysterics at the De Penable woman's
beastliness. I've had such a nice girl here to give me Italian lessons daily and with her or other acquaintances made at the hotel I've explored
all the divine villages about here--Pallanza and Baveno and Gignese, back in the hills and Cannobio, and Arona, etc. etc. I've taken a steamer
clear up to Locarno, the Swiss end of the lake, and the tram up to the top of Monte Mottarone--Sam, it's so steep that when you look down at the
lake below you the water seems absolutely to tip up like a tilted platter! So you're not to worry about me, I'm quite all right. I suppose I
ought to tell you that Arnold Israel has come down here from Vevey, you remember the nice American I wrote you about, he's staying here at this
same hotel.

I don't know that I ought to tell you this--even you, you old woofly-bear darling with your kind, decent, sympathetic mind might possibly
misunderstand for, with all your virtues, after all you do have an American way of looking at things, but I'm afraid some gossip might come to
you some day and I want you to understand. Needless to say, our relations are as innocent as though we were a boy and girl of eight and I do have
such a nice happy clean time with him--Sam, Arnold drives a car even faster than you do, my heart almost stopped yesterday when he was driving
118 kilometers an hour, but he's such a superb driver that I usually feel quite safe. Now I must hurry and dress. Bless you. I hope you're well
and happy. Best love to Emily and Harry.

F.


That afternoon he telephoned to the president of the Sans Souci Company that he was summoned abroad and could decide nothing for several months.
He telegraphed to New York for a steamer reservation. He dashed to Emily, to Tub, to Hazzard, and said good-bye. But it was a week before he
could sail, and meantime another letter had come from Fran--from Deauville:


Yes, here I am, and I don't like it much. This place is very gay but a little icky; lots of nice people but also DREADFUL ones, profiteers giving
cocktail parties, race-track touts infesting the lounge. I wish I'd gone to the Lido instead. Perhaps I will. See here now, Samivel. In your
letter, written to me at Vevey but received since I left, you said that you hoped I would, as you expressed it, "lay low" after my winter in
Paris and "get to bed early for a while." I don't suppose you meant to be unpleasant but you couldn't realize how jumpy and hurt and bewildered I
was after the horrible Penable affair, like a lost child, and how your scolding would hurt me. Am I to spend the rest of my life growing old as
gracefully AND AS FAST as I can, which is apparently YOUR ideal!

You talk as though I were some hell-raising flapper instead of a woman of the world who likes civilized amusements. There! I'm sure you didn't
mean to be scolding, but can't you understand how it might hit me when I was in a very high-strung condition? Really, Sam, you must be a little
more thoughtful! Do try to use a little imagination, now and then! Now that's off my chest and shall we just forget it? Only I must say--Sam, you
may think I'm unjust, but really it was essentially your fault that I ever had the De Penable trouble. If you hadn't insisted on running back to
America for your class reunion, which wasn't so awfully necessary, after all, if you had stuck by me so that I wasn't in the anomalous and almost
humiliating position of being without a husband, just like a lone adventuress, the De Penable woman would never have dared act as though I WERE
an adventuress and have turned on me the way she did. I hope you'll understand that I mean this only in the kindest and sweetest way, and we are,
after all, aren't we, one of the few married couples who understand each other so well that we can be frank, and next time I hope you'll try to
remember. There, that's over, and now for the news.

Yes, says the hussy defiantly, Arnold Israel IS here with me, that is, as I'm sure you'll understand, he is in no sense WITH me, but he's here in
Deauville. At first I wouldn't come along, but he was so thoughtful, so sweet, so understanding. He dug up somehow--I don't know how he does
these things but he has what one might call the spiritual as well as the financial Midas touch, do you know that I've just discovered that while
I thought he was merely loafing while he was away from his beastly old jute and hemp business, here in Europe, he's made about $40,000 by
gambling in exchange and buying and selling a, well, a REASONABLY authentic Rembrandt and he wanted to give me some pearls but of course I
wouldn't let him, but I'm drifting away from the thread of my story.

He found out at Stresa that a most respectable old Philadelphia couple, real Rittenhouse Square sort only fond of gaiety, were here, and he had
them invite me to come here under their wing, which made it all right and prevents any of the nasty kind of gossip such as a beast like the De
Penable woman loves. After all, I thought, I'm silly about NOT coming with him. Sam will NEVER misunderstand, he has imagination, and besides, I
realized, I'm not a young flittergibbet or one of these horrible female Ponce de Leons like De Penable, but a perfectly respectable matron who
has brought up a son and a daughter now married, and no one would ever think of gossiping.

So here I am and while, as I say, I'm not crazy about the place, Arnold and I and his friends, a Mr. and Mrs. Doone, perfectly DARLING people and
such wonderful sports though they're nearly seventy, we have gay little parties of our own and loaf around on the beach for hours nours nours at
a time. Address me c/o Paris, though I'm certain to be here for at least three weeks more, as there is a magnificent costume ball coming off to
which Arnold and I are going, most scrumptiously as the Sirocco and the North Wind, me with my nice pale Swede hair being naturally the North
Wind. Lots of love,

F.


Sam cabled, "Sailing carmania meet you paris hotel universel september two." He added "Love," and crossed it out, and put it in again.

Twelve days later he was looking at the long fortifications at Cherbourg, watching the voluble little Frenchmen on the tender.

On deck, by night and day, he had walked out of his system all irritation at Fran, all hatred of Arnold Israel. When he had finished her letter
from Deauville, he had suddenly grasped something which he had never completely formulated in their twenty-three years of marriage: that she was
not in the least a mature and responsible woman, mother and wife and administrator, but simply a clever child, with a child's confused self-
dramatizations. The discovery had dismayed him. Then it had made him the more tender. His other children, Brent and Emily, did not need him; his
child Fran did need him! Something in life still needed him! He thought of her, awaiting him there in Paris, as he had thought of her in the
uncomplicated days of their courtship.



CHAPTER 20


Late of a cloudy afternoon, the Paris express slid through the thunderous gloom of the train shed, and Sam was jumpy with the excitement of
arrival, looking down at the porters as though they were his friends, smiling at the advertisements of Cointreau and Fernet Branca, of Rouen and
Avignon, on the station walls. He marched quickly out of the train, peering for Fran, anxious when he did not see her, and he felt utterly let
down as he clumped after the porter with his bags.

She was at the end of the platform.

He saw her afar; he was startled to know how much lovelier she was than he had remembered. In a cool blue coat and skirt, with a white blouse,
her hair, pale and light-touched as new straw, her slim legs so silken, her shoulders so confident, she was the American athletic girl, swift to
dance, to play tennis, to drive like a cyclone. She was so vital, so YOUNG! His heart caught with admiration. But he was conscious that her face
was unhappy, and that she looked at the approaching passengers only mechanically. Didn't she want him--

He came up to her shyly. He was confused by the rather polite smile that masked her face, but holding her by her shoulders, looming over her, he
murmured, "Did I remember to write you that I adore you?"

"Why, no, I don't believe you did. Do you? That's very nice, I'm sure."

Her tone was as light and smooth and passionless, her laugh was as distant, as the banter of an actress in a drawing-room comedy.

They were strangers.

At the hotel she said hesitantly, "Uh, Sam--do you mind--I thought you'd be tired after the journey. I know I am, after coming from Deauville. So
I got two single rooms instead of a double. But they're right next to each other."

"No, maybe better rest," he said.

She came with him into his room, but she hovered near the door, saying with a dreadful politeness, "I hope you will find the room all right. It
has quite a nice bathroom."

He hesitated. "I'll unpack later. Let's not hang around here now. Let's skip right out and catch us a good old sidewalk cafe and watch the world
go by again!" Wretchedly he noted that she looked relieved. He had given her but a tap of a kiss. She had demanded no further caress.



She was courteous, while he gossiped of Zenith; she laughed at the right moments; and she remained a stranger, forced to entertain the friend of
a friend and wanting to get the duty over. She did ask questions about Emily and Brent, but when he talked of Tub, of golfing, she did not
listen.

He could not endure it, but he said only, tenderly, "What's matter, honey? You seem kind of far off. Not feeling well? Glad to see me?"

"Of course! It's nothing. It's just--I guess I didn't sleep very well last night. I'm a little nervy. But of course I'm glad to see you, dear old
bear!"

And still they had not talked of Madame de Penable, of Arnold Israel, of Stresa and Deauville. He had kept from it as much as she; he had said
only, "Too bad you had your trouble with Mrs. Penable, but I'm glad you had some fun after that. Your letters were great." He sounded provincial
to himself as he maundered about Zenith, sounded rather dull and thick, but his senses were furiously awake. He noted how agitated she seemed. He
noted that she drank three cocktails. He noted that he, Sam Dodsworth, was slowly massing for a battle, and that he dreaded it.

When they dressed for dinner, she closed the door between their two rooms.

"Let's go to Voisin's, where we can be quiet and talk," said he, when she came in to announce that she was ready.

"Oh, wouldn't you rather go some place a little more festive?"

"I would not!"

Then first was he brusque.

"I want to talk!"

She shrugged.

After the soup, he bumbled, "Well, I guess I've given you most of the news. Let's talk about plans. Where would you like to go, this fall? What
about a good, long, easy hike through Italy and Spain and maybe over to Greece and Constantinople?"

"Why, I think that would be very nice, a little later on. But just now--After all, I've had a dreadfully rustic summer--and of course you have,
you poor thing! I think we both deserve a little gaiety here in Paris before we leave. After all, when you go traveling around to assorted
places, you're frightfully detached from people."

Then, very blandly, as though it wasn't at all necessary to have his agreement, "I think we might stay here three months or so, and we might take
a nice apartment up near the Etoile. I'm so sick of hotels."

"Well--" He stopped; then it came in a slow tidal wave. "I don't blame you for being sick of hotels. So am I! But I certainly don't intend to
spend all fall, as I spent all spring, sitting on my rear in Paris--"

"Need you be vulgar?"

"Yes, I guess I need to. I don't intend to sit around here all fall, waiting for you to go. When we first started out, I was willing either to go
on living in Zenith or travel, but if I'm going to travel, I want to TRAVEL--to see things, see different kinds of people and towns. I'd like to
see Venice and Madrid; I'd like to have some German beer. I don't propose to go on being sacrificed to your ambition as a social climber--"

She flared, "That is a lie, and you know it's a lie! Do you think I have to CLIMB to meet people like Renee de Penable? Climb DOWN, if anything!
But I do find it rather more amusing to play with civilized people than to sit and soak at the New York Bar--yes, or go around gaping at ruins
with a Baedeker! It's all very well for you, but I have to do the packing, I have to interpret for you. I have to plan the trip. Heavens, we'll
GO to Venice! But is there any need of our galumphing off like a Cook's tour when we could have a charming autumn here, with our own flat and
servants, and all the friends that I have here now--quite independent of the De Penable person? I'm sorry, Sam, but if you could just
occasionally try to catch somebody ELSE'S point of view--I should prefer to remain right here in Paris for--"

"Fran!"

"Well?"



He hesitated. While they talked, round them flowed the amenity of good service, and if they were two volcanoes, they kept their rumblings low,
and to any observer they seemed merely a large and impassive man, probably English, and a woman with a quick-changing face who was a little angry
but very much in control of her anger.

"Fran! You really would sacrifice me, to stay here?"

"Don't be so melodramatic! I can't see that it's any sacrifice to remain in the loveliest city--"

"Is Arnold Israel here in Paris?"

"Yes, he is! What of it?"

"When did you see him last?"

"This noon."

"He going to stay here in Paris some time?"

"I don't know. How should I know? Yes, I suppose he is."

"He give you any ideas about a flat near the Etoile?"

"See here, my dear Samuel! Have you been reading novels? Just what is the idea of this comic returned-husband-sternly-cross-examining-loose-wife
pose--"

"Fran! How far did you go with this Israel?"

"Have you any idea how insulting you are?"

"Have you any idea how insulting I'm going to be, if you don't stop this injured-innocent business?"

"And have you any idea of how angry I'm going to be if you continue to act like a barroom bully--which is what you are, essentially! I've
concealed it from myself, for years, but I knew all the time--The great Sam Dodsworth, the football player, the celebrated bruiser, the renowned
bully! Why, you belong in the kitchen, with the corner policeman, not among civilized--"

"You haven't answered! How far did you go with this Israel? I'm doing you the honor of asking you, not of snooping. And you haven't answered."

"And I most certainly do not intend to answer! It's an insult to be expected--And it's an insult to Mr. Israel! He is a gentleman! I wish he were
here! You wouldn't dare to talk to me as you've been talking, if he were here. He's quite as powerful as you are, my dear Samuel--and he has
brains and breeding and manners as well. Aah! 'How far did you go in sin with your hellish lover!' After all the years I've tried to do something
for you, you still have the vocabulary of a Laura Jean Libbey novel! Arnold, you will be shocked to learn, is so unregenerate that he prefers
Andre Gide and Paul Morand to Laura Jean Libbey, and of course it's Black Guilt for me to have found a little pleasure in talking to him instead
of discussing poker with your lovely friend Mr. Tub Pearson--"

While she raced on, quietly hysterical, he knew the answer to his question, and he was astonished that he was not more astonished, shocked that
he was not more shocked. He did not greatly press her. When she stopped, shaking with muted sobs which he pitied, he said, gently:

"You found him very romantic?"

"Of course! He is!"

"Perhaps I can understand that--more or less."

"Oh, Sam, please DO be human and understand! You do it so well, when you forget your Stern Man of Granite role and let yourself be sweet. Of
COURSE there was nothing wrong between Arnold and me--Isn't it funny how--I'm just as bad as I accused you of being! Using old cant phrases like
that! 'Nothing wrong between Arnold and me!' After all, though, perhaps I was unjust to you; perhaps you didn't mean anything of the kind but
merely--You are kind, Sam, but if you don't mind my saying so, you're just the least little bit clumsy, now and then--"

She had checked her hysteria, had become amiable and prattling and self-confident again, and all the while he was reflecting, "She's lying. She
never used to lie. She's changed. This fellow is her lover."

"--and what I suppose you were really hinting at was that I may have been handsomely kissed by my ardent Jewish friend, before I left Deauville.
Well, I was! And I liked it! It doesn't matter if I never see him again--Oh, Sam, if you could only UNDERSTAND how humiliating and infuriating it
was of you to suggest that my desire to stay here had anything whatever to do with Arnold! But he was charming. If you could only have seen him,
lolling among the sand dunes as though (I used to tell him) he were a Maharajah among gold cushions, with white flannels, and his hair wild and
his shirt open at the throat--It would've looked silly and pretentious with any other man, but on him it seemed natural. And all the while, with
all his gorgeousness, talking so simply, so confidingly--really, it was touching. But haven't we talked enough of him? We must still make our
plans--"

"Let's get him settled first. I've got--"

"Sam, the thing you never could realize about him, even if you met him, was how TOUCHING he was. Clever and handsome and rich and so on, and yet
such a child! He needed some one like me to talk to. Oh, I was just an audience for him--nice old mother confessor. He was condescending enough
to say that for a venerable dame of forty-two, I was still an excellent imitation of a pretty wench, and he'd supposed I was five years younger
than himself, not two years older. And that I was the best dancer he'd found in Europe. But of course the bouquets were just preliminary to his
talking about himself and his unhappy childhood, and you know what a fool I am about children--the least hint that anybody has had an unhappy
childhood and I dissolve in tears! Poor Arnold! He suffered as a boy because he WAS clever and strong. Nobody could believe how sensitive he was.
And his mother was a grim, relentless old dragon, who hated weakness of any kind, or what she thought was weakness, and when she'd find him
daydreaming, she'd accuse him of loafing--Oh, it must have been hell, for so fine a spirit! And then in college, the usual trouble of the too
clever and too handsome Jew--high-hatted by the stupidest, drabbest, meanest Yankees and Middle-westerners--they looked down on him, just the way
a dray-horse might look down on a fine race-horse. Poor Arnold! Of course I was touched by so proud a person as he CARING to tell me about his
real self."

"Fran! You don't suppose that this is the first time your Mr. Israel has used the neglected-childhood approach? And apparently successfully!"

"Are you AGAIN hinting that I fell for him?"

"I am! It's rather important to know! Did you?"

"Well, then--yes. I did."

"Oh!"

"And I'm proud of it! I couldn't, once--under your heavy-handed tutelage, my dear Samuel!--have believed it possible to be an 'erring wife'! What
blind hypocrites people are! And when it did happen, it all seemed so right, so natural and sweet--"

While she raced on he was incredulously admitting that this abominable thing, this newspaper-headline, divorce-court, sensational-novel
degradation had actually happened to him--to her--to Emily and Brent. He had a fascinated desire to know details. He pictured this Arnold Israel,
this black leopard of a man--no, too big for a black leopard, but that sort of gracefulness--returning to her Deauville hotel with her, shirt
open at his too smooth throat--no, he'd be coming home with her in evening clothes, probably with a cape thrown back. He'd accompany her to her
room at the hotel in Deauville; whisper, "Just let me come in for one good-night kiss." Then Fran became real. Since he had arrived, Sam's eyes
had seen her but cloudily, his ears had heard her only as a stranger. Now he peered at her, was conscious of her, in black and silver, conscious
of the curve from shoulder to breast; and he was raging at the thought of Israel.

All his long thinking and his wrath slid by in five seconds and he had not missed a word as she panted:

"You think it's an overwhelming attack on Arnold to suggest that he's used the same tactics before! Of course he has--of course he's had other
affairs--perhaps lots of them! Thank Heaven for that! He's had some training in the arts of love. He understands women. He doesn't think they're
merely business partners. Let me tell you, my dear Samuel, it would be better for you, and for me both, if you'd devoted a little of your
valuable time to the despised art of rousing a woman to some degree of romantic passion--if you'd given some of the attention you've lavished on
carburetors to me--and possibly even to other women--I suppose you have been what is called 'faithful' to me since our marriage."

"I have!"

"Well, doubtless I ought to be highly gratified--"

"Fran! Do you want to marry this fellow Israel?"

"Heavens no! . . . Anyway, I don't think so."

"And yet you want to see him every day this fall."

"That's different. But not marry him. He's too much like plum cake--wonderful at a Christmas feast, but he'd bring indigestion. For a permanent
diet I'd prefer good, honest, dependable bread--which you are--please don't think that's insulting; it's really a great compliment. No! Besides,
he doesn't want to! I doubt if he'd care for any one woman for more than six months. Oh, I believe him when he says that he's almost morbidly
faithful to the one woman while it lasts, but--"

"Has he got a wife some place?"

"I don't think so. I don't know! Heavens! Does it matter?"

"It may!"

"Oh, don't try to be melodramatic! It doesn't suit your Strong Calm Manly type! Anyway, Arnold wouldn't marry me, because I'm not a Jew. He's
just as proud of being a Jew as you are of being a Nordic. He ought to be! He's more or less related to the Mendelssohns and the Rothschilds and
all kinds of really significant people. A cousin of his in Vienna--"

"Fran! Have you any idea how serious this business is?"

"Well, rather more than you have, perhaps!"

"I doubt it! Fran, you'll either marry him or cut him out, absolutely and completely."

"My dear Samuel, he might have something to say about that! He's not one of your meek Revelation secretaries. And I won't be bullied!"

"Yes, you will! For the first time! God knows you're getting off easy. Oh, I'm not the kind that would grab a shotgun and start off to get you
and your lover--"

"Well, I should hope not!"

"Don't be so sure! I could turn that way, if you just went on long enough! No, I'm not that kind, especially. But, by God, I'm still less of the
complaisant husband who's going to sit around and watch his wife entertain her lover, as you've planned to, this fall--"

"I haven't admitted that I plan to do any--"

"You've admitted it and more! Now you'll either come away and travel with me, and chuck this fellow and forget him, or I'll divorce you--for
adultery!"

"Ridiculous!"

"Worse than that! Horrible! You can imagine how Brent and Emily will feel!"

Very slowly: "Sam, I never till this moment suspected that--I knew you were stupid and heavy and slow and fond of vulgar people, but I never knew
you were simply a bullying rotten cad! No one has ever spoken so to me in all my life!"

"I know it. I've baby'd you. You regard yourself, young woman, as the modern American, with fancy European improvements. But I'm a lot more
modern than you are. I'm a builder. I don't have to depend on any title or clothes or social class or anything else to be distinctive. And you've
never seen it! You've just lambasted me because I AM slow and clumsy, till you've stolen every bit of self-confidence I have. You've been the
traitor to me in my own home. Criticizing! Not nagging, but just enjoying yourself by being so sweet and superior to me and humbling me. That was
worse than your affair with this Israel."

"Oh, I haven't done that! Oh, I didn't mean to! I respect you so!"

"Do you respect me when you want me to sit around and be valet to your lover!"

"Oh no, no, no, I--Oh, I can't think clearly. I'm all confused. I--Yes, if you want, we'll leave for Spain tomorrow."

They did.



CHAPTER 21


Since the days of Alexander the Great there has been a fashionable belief that travel is agreeable and highly educative. Actually, it is one of
the most arduous yet boring of all pastimes and, except in the case of a few experts who go globe-trotting for special purposes, it merely
provides the victim with more topics about which to show ignorance. The great traveler of the novelists is tall and hawk-nosed, speaking nine
languages, annoying all right-thinking persons by constantly showing drawing-room manners. He has "been everywhere and done everything." He has
shot lions in Siberia and gophers in Minnesota, and played tennis with the King at Stockholm. He can give you a delightful evening discoursing on
Tut's tomb and the ethnology of the Maoris.

Actually, the great traveler is usually a small mussy person in a faded green fuzzy hat, inconspicuous in a corner of the steamer bar. He speaks
only one language, and that gloomily. He knows all the facts about nineteen countries, except the home-lives, wage-scales, exports, religions,
politics, agriculture, history and languages of those countries. He is as valuable as Baedeker in regard to hotels and railroads, only not so
accurate.

He who has seen one cathedral ten times has seen something; he who has seen ten cathedrals once has seen but little; and he who has spent half an
hour in each of a hundred cathedrals has seen nothing at all. Four hundred pictures all on a wall are four hundred times less interesting than
one picture; and no one knows a cafe till he has gone there often enough to know the names of the waiters.

These are the laws of travel.

If travel were so inspiring and informing a business as the new mode of round-the-world-tour advertisements eloquently sets forth, then the
wisest men in the world would be deck hands on tramp steamers, Pullman porters, and Mormon missionaries.

It is the awful toil which is the most distressing phase of travel. If there is anything worse than the aching tedium of staring out of car
windows, it is the irritation of getting tickets, packing, finding trains, lying in bouncing berths, washing without water, digging out
passports, and fighting through customs. To live in Carlsbad is seemly and to loaf at San Remo healing to the soul, but to get from Carlsbad to
San Remo is of the devil.

Actually, most of those afflicted with the habit of traveling merely lie about its pleasures and profits. They do not travel to see anything, but
to get away from themselves, which they never do, and away from rowing with their relatives--only to find new relatives with whom to row. They
travel to escape thinking, to have something to do, just as they might play solitaire, work cross-word puzzles, look at the cinema, or busy
themselves with any other dreadful activity.

These things the Dodsworths discovered, though, like most of the world, they never admitted them.



More than cathedrals or castles, more even than waiters, Sam remembered the Americans he met along the way. Writers speak confidently, usually
insultingly, of an animal called "the typical American traveling abroad." One might as well speak of "a typical human being." The Americans whom
Sam encountered ranged from Bostonian Rhodes scholars to Arkansas farmers, from Riviera tennis players to fertilizer salesmen.

There were Mr. and Mrs. Meece from Ottumwa, Iowa, at a palm-smothered hotel in Italy. Mr. Meece had been a druggist for forty-six years, and his
wife looked like two apples set one on top the other. They plodded at sight-seeing all day long; they took things exactly in the order in which
the guide-book gave them; and they missed nothing--art galleries, aquariums, the King Ludwig monument in two shades of pink granite, or the site
of the house in which Gladstone spent two weeks in 1887. If they enjoyed anything, they did not show it. But neither did they look bored. Their
expressions showed precisely nothing. They returned to the hotel at five daily, and always dined in the grill at six, and Mr. Meece was allowed
one glass of beer. He was never heard to say anything whatever to his wife except, "Well, getting late."

In the same hotel with them were the Noisy Pair: two New Yorkers who at all hours were heard, widely heard, observing that all Europeans were
inefficient, that they could get no hot water after midnight, that hotel prices were atrocious, that no revue in Europe was as good as Ziegfeld's
Follies, that they couldn't buy Lucky Strike cigarettes or George Washington coffee in this doggone Wop town, and that lil ole Broadway was good
enough for THEM.

They were followed by other Americans: Professor and Mrs. Whittle of Northern Wisconsin Baptist University--Professor Whittle taught Greek and
knew more about stained glass and the manufacture of Benedictine than any American living, and Mrs. Whittle had taken her doctorate at Bonn on
the philosophy of Spinoza but really preferred fruit-ranching. The Whittles were followed by Percy West, the explorer of Yucatan; by Mr. Roy
Hoops, who sold motor tires; by Judge and Mrs. Cady of Massachusetts--the Cadys had lived in the same house for five generations; by Mr. Otto
Kretch and Mr. Fred Larabee of Kansas City, two oil men who were on a golfing tour of the world, to take three years; by the brass-bound heel-
clicking Colonel Thorne; by Mr. Lawrence Simton, who dressed like a lily and spoke like a lady; by Miss Addy T. Belcher, who was collecting
material for a new lecture trip on foreign politics and finance and who, off stage, resembled a chorus girl; and by Miss Rose Love, the musical
comedy star, who off stage resembled a short-sighted school teacher.

Typical Americans!



Sam never lost the adventurousness of seeing on a railway car a sign promising that the train was going from Paris to Milan, Venice, Trieste,
Zagreb, Vinkovci, Sofia and Stamboul. Though he became weary of wandering, so that one museum was like another, so that when he awoke in the
morning it took a minute to remember in what country he was, yet the names of foreign towns always beckoned him.

To Avignon, they wandered, to San Sebastian and Madrid and Toledo and Seville. To Arles, Carcassonne, Marseilles, Monte Carlo. To Genoa,
Florence, Sienna, Venice, with two months divided between Naples and Rome and a jaunt to Sicily. To Vienna, Budapest, Munich, Nuremberg. And so,
late in April, they came to Berlin.

Sam might not tell of it when he went home, nor years later remember it, but he found that to him the real characteristic of Making a Foreign
Tour had nothing to do with towers or native costumes, galleries or mountain scenery. It was the tedium of almost every hotel, almost every
evening, when they had completed their chore of sight-seeing. There was "nothing to do in the evening" save occasional movies, or cafes if they
were not too far from the hotel in the foreign and menacing darkness.

Every evening the same. Back to the hotel, weary, a grateful cup of tea, and slow dressing. They never dared, after trying it once, to go down to
dinner in tweeds and be stared at by the English tourists of the pay-in-guineas classes as though they were polluting the dining-room.

A melancholy cocktail in the bar. Dinner, always the same--white and gold dining-room, suavely efficient black-haired captain of waiters pulling
out their chairs, a clear soup of parenthetic flavor, a fish not merely white but blanched, chicken with gloomy little carrots, creme caramel,
cheese and fruit. The same repressed and whispering fellow-diners: the decayed American mother in silver with the almost equally decayed daughter
in gold, staring pitifully at the large lone Englishman; the young intellectual Prussian honeymoon couple, pretending to read and ignore each
other, and the fat mature Bavarian couple, wanting to be cheery but not daring. The aged Britons--he with a spurt of eyebrows and positive
opinions on artichokes and the rate of exchange; she always glaring over her glasses at you if you laughed or asked the head-waiter about trains
to Grasse. The vicar of the local English church, moistly friendly, the one person who came and spoke to you but who, by his manner of inquiring
after your health, made you feel guilty because you weren't going to his service next Sunday.

Then the real tedium.

Sitting till ten in the lounge, listening to an orchestra mildly celebrating the centenary of Verdi, reading an old Tauchnitz, peeping up
uneasily as you felt more and more the tightening of personal ties with these too well-known, too closely studied strangers.

It was worse when the hotel was half empty and the desert of waiting chairs in the lounge looked so lonely.

Always the same, except in a few cities with casinos and cabarets and famous restaurants--the same in Florence and Granada, in Hyeres and
Dresden.

Every evening after such a siege of boredom Sam guiltily inquired of himself why they hadn't gone out and looked at what was called the "Native
Life" of the city--at the ways of that inconspicuous 99/100 of the population whom tourists ignored. But--Oh, they'd tried it. It wasn't a matter
of dark-alley dangers; he would rather have liked a fight in a low bar. But foreign languages, the need of ordering a drink or asking a taxi fare
in Italian or Spanish, was like crawling through a hedge of prickly thorns. And to go anywhere in dress clothes save to tourist-ridden
restaurants was to be tormented by stares, comments, laughter. The frankness with which these Italians stared at Fran--

No, easier to stay in the hotel.

Once in a fortnight Sam was able to let himself be picked up in the bar by some American or English blade, and then he glowed and talked
beamingly of motors, of Ross Ireland. And Fran welcomed and was gracious with such rescuers . . . whatever she said in the bedroom afterward
about manners and vulgarity.

But it thrust them together, this aching tedium of marooned evenings, and they were often tender.

And Fran was getting tired of the isolation of travel. He gloated that before long, now, she would be content to go home with him, to STAY, and
at last, fed up on the syrupy marshmallows of what she had considered Romance, to become his wife.



Twilight in Naples, and from their room at Bertolini's they looked across the bay. The water and the mountains in the water were the color of
smoke, and a few little boats, far out, were fleeing home before dark. In the garden below them the fronds of a palm tree waved slowly, and lemon
trees exhaled an acrid sweetness. The lights at the foot of Vesuvius were flickering steel points. Her hand slipped into his and she whispered,
"I hope the boats get safely home!" They stood there till palms and sea had vanished and they could see only the lights of Naples. Some one afar
was singing "Sant Lucia." Sam Dodsworth did not know the song was hackneyed.

"Tee--ta--tah, tee de dee, tee--ta--tah, taaaa--da," he hummed. Italy and Fran! The Bay of Naples! And they would go on--to sun-bright isles, to
the moon-hushed desert, pagoda bells, and home! "Tee--ta--tah, tee de dee--Santaaaaa Lucia!" He had won her back to be his wife!

"And they still sing that horrible grind-organ garbage! Let's go eat," she said.

He startled and sighed.



They were again companions, as they had been in their first days of Paris, and sometimes they had whole afternoons that were gay, trusting,
filled with the vigor of laughter and long walks. They had again the sweetness of depending on each other. But Sam was conscious that their
relationship had become self-conscious.

Much of the time Fran was straining to be friendly. Getting into a rut of it, they quarreled more often over tinier things.

He knew that he had bruised her, humiliated her, by his bullying in Paris, but he could not, in all his hours of agonizing about it, see what
else he could have done. He tried to win her with little gifts of flowers, of odd carved boxes, and he fretted over her being chilly at night,
hot at noon, tired in galleries, till she wailed, "Oh, don't FUSS so! I'm all RIGHT!"

"If I could only do things naturally and easily, the way that fellow Israel probably does," he sighed to himself . . . and fancied that she was
sighing.

He caught himself being critical. For all his "trying to make it up to her," as he put it, he was testily aware of certain childishnesses in her
which he had ignored.

In the matter of money she was a brat. She talked, always, of her thoughtfulness about economy; of jewing down a milliner from a thousand francs
to seven hundred, of doing without a personal maid. But she took it for granted that they should have the best suite in the best hotel in every
town, and she so used the floor maid and the hair-dresser and so had to tip them that a personal maid would have been cheaper.

Sam would have liked to economize a little. He still brooded on the Sans Souci Gardens--though he never subjected his dream to her brisk
ridicule, for he guessed what she would say about the idiocy of Italian palaces in Zenith. If he could ever coax her back, he would try the
gamble of building (if she permitted him!), and in it he could use all the capital he had.

But he never spoke to her of money, and she never suggested that an ordinary room would do them as well as the royal suite, and if she made any
comment at all it was only on the inferiority of that suite.



For hours at a time he assured himself of Fran's beauty, gracefulness, wit, and her knowledge of European languages and customs. He convinced
himself--except in Venice, when they were with Mrs. Cortright.

Edith Cortright had been born in Michigan, daughter of a banker who became Secretary of the Treasury of the United States. In Washington she had
married Cecil R. A. Cortright of the British Embassy, and gone with him to the Argentine, to Portugal, to Rome, to Roumania, where he was
minister, and on many vacations home to England. She was about the age of Fran, fortyish, and she had been a widow now for three years, wandering
from England to Italy and back. A note from Jack Starling, Tub Pearson's nephew in London, sent her to call on the Dodsworths at the Danieli in
Venice, and she invited them to tea at her flat, a floor of the Ascagni Palace; echoing rooms, stone floored, with tall windows on the Grand
Canal, with the light from a marble fireplace on chests of smoky walnut and vast tables worn satiny with age.

Sam was at first not vastly taken with Edith Cortright. She was abrupt as she talked of diplomats, of villas on the Riviera, of Roman society, of
painting. She was dressed in soft black, worn a little sloppily, and she was pale. But he saw how lovely her hands were, and realized that her
quiet voice was soothing. He guessed that her intense eyes missed nothing.

Fran played up to Mrs. Cortright. She too talked of diplomats, she too had notions about villas and society and painting, and on their way home
she informed Sam that her Italian accent was MUCH better than Mrs. Cortright's. Suddenly, though resenting his own criticism as though some one
else were daring to make it, he felt that Fran knew considerably less than he--and she--had always assumed. Her Italian! She knew a hundred
words! Villas! They'd never seen a Riviera villa from a more intimate position than the outside wall!

He reflected that Fran had an unsurpassed show-window display but not much on the shelves inside.

Then he was angry with himself; then he pitied her; then loved her for her childish shrillness of make-believe, her eagerness to be noticed and
admired.

He wished they were going to see more of Mrs. Cortright. He felt that she really belonged to this puzzling, reticent thing called Europe and that
she might make it clear to him.



Sam was surprised, felt rather guilty, to find that he was becoming more a master of the nervous art of travel than Fran. In Paris she had been
supreme; had taken to language and manners and food hectically, while he stood outside. And she still insisted that he couldn't understand
Italian waiters and shopping and lace shawls and cathedrals as she could. But while she was daily becoming more uncertain, he was daily
developing more of a sure purpose in travel.

He was going back to make some such a "development" as the Sans Souci Gardens, and contemplating it he was becoming conscious that there was such
a thing as architecture. Details that once he would never have noticed became alive: hand-wrought iron balconies, baroque altars, tiled roofs,
window shutters, copper pans in kitchens seen from the street. He began, shyly keeping it from Fran, to sketch doorways. He began, in the
evenings of hotel tedium, to read stray notes on architecture--guide-book introductions, articles in copies of Country Life found in the hotel--
instead of news-stand detective stories.

It made him increasingly eager to be out each morning and to see new things, to collect knowledge; and somehow, increasingly, it was he who
planned where they should go, he who was willing to confer with concierges and guides, and it was Fran who followed him.



The contrast between Fran and Mrs. Cortright kept annoying him. He was not very well pleased to see that after twenty four years of living with
Fran he had not in the least come to know her.

Always, particularly when they had first come abroad, he had considered her clearly superior to other American women. Most of these others, he
had grunted to himself, were machines. They sobbed about babies and dressmakers and nothing else. They were either hard-voiced and suspicious, or
gushing. Their only emotion was a hatred of their men, with whom they joyously kept up a cat and mouse feud, trying to catch them at flirtation,
at poker-playing. But Fran, he had gloated, had imagination and flair and knowledge. She talked of politics and music; she laughed; she told
excited stories; she played absurd pleasant games--he was the big brown bear and she the white rabbit; he was the oak and she the west wind who
ruffled his foliage--and she did it, too, until he begged mercy. She never entered a drawing-room--she made an entrance. She paused at the door,
dramatic, demanding, stately in simple black and white, where other women hesitated into a room, fussy and tawdry. And they glowered, those other
women, when Fran gathered in the men and was to be heard talking with derisive gaiety about tennis, Egyptian excavations, Bolshevism--everything
in the world.

He had been so proud of her!

And in Paris, at first--how different her devouring of French life from the flatness of the American women whom he heard in restaurants croaking,
in tinny, Midwestern voices, "Mabel says she knows a place in Paris where she can buy Ivory Soap, but I've found one where I can get Palm Olive
Soap for seven cents a cake!"

Ah, he had rejoiced, not of these was his Fran--swift silver huntress, gallant voyager, shrewd critic, jubilant companion!

And now, however he cursed himself for it, he could not down the wonder whether she really was any of these poetic things--whether she didn't
merely play at them. He could never root out suspicion, planted when he had read her letter about Deauville and Arnold Israel, that she was in
heart and mind and soul an irresponsible child. And the minute he was pleased with the bright child quality in her, the irresponsibility annoyed
him. . . . Bobbing at cherries is not so pretty a sport at forty-three.

A child.

Now she was ecstatic--a little too demandingly ecstatic for his unwieldiness to follow her--over a moonlit sea, a tenor solo, or a masterpiece of
artichoke cookery. Half an hour later she was in furious despair over a hard bed, a lukewarm bath, or a missing nail-file; and Sam was always to
blame, and decidedly was to be told about it. He was to blame if it rained, or if they could not get a table by the window in a restaurant; it
was not her tardy dressing but his clumsiness in ordering a taxi which made them late for the theater.

She was a child in her way of preening herself over every attractive man who looked interestedly at her along the journey--now that she had been
converted to salvation by passion. And she was equally a child in laughing at, in forgetting, the older and less glittering men who were kind to
them on trains and friendly at hotels. She forgot so easily!

Sam was certain that she had forgotten Arnold Israel. He identified certain Paris letters, with a thick, black, bold script, as Israel's. At
first she was jumpy and secretive about them; then, in a month, she let them lie unopened. And once, apropos of a gesticulating operatic
baritone, she began making fun of Israel's ardors. . . . He would almost have been gladder, Sam sighed, if she had enough loyalty to remember
Arnold longer.

She was lovely quicksilver, but quicksilver is hard for a thick hand to hold.

A child!

He noted, too, her pretentiousness when she was with people like Mrs. Cortright. Fran let it be known that she herself was of importance. She
rebuked people who--never having seen her before--failed to know that she was an expert at tennis, French and good manners. She didn't exactly
say it, but she spoke as though ruddy old Herman Voelker, her respectable sire, had been at least a baron, and she was forever laughing at this
fellow-traveler as being "common" and approving that other as being of "quite a good family--quite decent." She was like a child boasting to a
playmate of her father's wealth.

But he felt it with a brooding pity that made him the fonder--made it the harder for him to fight his way free from her capricious domination of
his life.

So, after months given more to exploring themselves than to exploring Europe, they came in April to Berlin.



CHAPTER 22


The good Herr Rechtsanwalt Biedner was giving a dinner, at his flat just off the Tiergarten, to his second cousin, Fran Dodsworth, and to Fran's
husband. Herr Dr. Biedner was very Prussian, with close-cropped head, small eyes, hard jaw, and sausage rolls at the back of his neck, and he was
probably the kindest and pleasantest man the Dodsworths had ever met, and the most international-minded.

Now, in the spring of 1927, Berlin looked prosperous again; also Herr Biedner had an excellent law practise, and his home was as thick with
comfort as a coffee cake with sugar. In the hallway was an armoire of carved oak, and the horns of a stag; in the living-room, about a monumental
stove of green porcelain, was a perfect auction-room of old easy chairs, and what seemed like hundreds of portraits of the Kaiser, Bismarck, Von
Moltke, Beethoven, and Bach clustered behind the grand piano.

Sam was edified to discover that a porcelain stove really could heat a room, and that the pianist of the family was not Frau Biedner or some
unrevealed daughter but Herr Biedner himself, though he seemed to be a perfectly worthy and successful lawyer. He was also gratified by the sight
of three wine glasses at each plate, and of slim green bottles of Deidesheimer Auslese, 1921.

But the conversation appalled him.

They were so kind, these half dozen German business men and their wives whom Herr Biedner had assembled to greet his American cousins, and they
all spoke English. But they talked of things which meant nothing in the world to Sam--of the Berlin theater, of the opera, of a Kokoschka
Austellung, of Stresemann's speech at the League of Nations Council, of the agrarian situation in Upper Silesia--

"Golly, this is going to be heavy going," sighed Sam. "I wish somebody would tell a funny story."

And with weighty politeness he answered the weightily polite queries of the woman next him: Was this his first trip to Germany? Was he going to
stay long in Berlin? Was it really true that since Prohibition it was difficult to get wine in America?

The one light was the man beside Fran at dinner. With apparent gratification, Biedner had introduced him as Count Obersdorf, taking Sam aside to
explain that Kurt von Obersdorf was the present head of one of the greatest Austrian families. His ancestors had owned castles, towns, thousands
of acres, whole counties; they had had power of life and death; kings had bargained for their support. But the family had steadily grown poor the
past two hundred years, and been finally ruined by the Great War, in which the Graf Kurt had served as major of Austrian artillery. Though his
mother kept up a pretense of state, with two slew-footed peasant servants in a ruined old house in the Salzkammergut, Kurt was working in the
Berlin bureau of the Internation Tourist Agency (the famous I.T.A.). He could not afford to marry. He had a reasonable salary; he was head of the
I.T.A.'s banking department; but he had to "punch the time-clock," said Herr Dr. Biedner, obviously proud of this Americanism. "He is a fine
sport about it. And he uses not much his title. His ancestors probably hanged my ancestors for shooting rabbits, but now he is like one of us
here in my household, and he says that nowhere else in Berlin can he get a proper Suppe mit Leberknodel."

Being impressed by the title of count and by a vision of hard-riding ancestors in armor, Sam assured himself that he wasn't in the least
impressed by title or ancestors, and he studied the family hero attentively.

Kurt von Obersdorf was perhaps forty. He was a tall, loose, lively man, with thick black hair. He had dignity enough, but he was full of
laughter, and you felt that by choice he would like to be a clown. He made love to every woman and made friends with every man. Fran blushed when
he kissed her hand, and Sam felt less disconsolate, less swamped by foreigners, when Kurt shook his hand and babbled in an Oxford accent with
occasional tumbles into comic-paper diction, "I know so much about your Revelation car. Herr Dr. Biedner tells me you were responsible for it. I
am enchanted to see you here in Berlin. Since six years I have driven a Revelation, the same car, it belongs to a friend, it is very shabby but
the other day I drove it to Wild Park at a hundred and fifty kilometers an hour. I was arrested!"

Kurt demanded to see the Biedner grand-child (rather a nasty child, Sam thought, but Kurt chittered at it boisterously); then he played the
piano; then he mixed the cocktails which Herr Biedner regarded as suitable to Americans and which the good burgher guests tasted with polite and
beaming anxiety.

"Lively fellow, that count. Shows off too much. Never sits still," Sam meditated, with a sound American disapproval of foreign monkey-tricks, and
all the while he liked Kurt better than any one he had met since Paris.

All through dinner, Kurt concentrated on Fran.

Sam became restive as he overheard Kurt dashingly tell Fran just what her "type" was, and cheerfully insult her by announcing what he liked and
what he detested about that type.

"Yes," Sam caught, "you regard yourself as very European, Mrs. Dodsworth, but you are altogedder American. You are brilliant. You are an
automobile's head-light. You learn quick. But you hurry right out and use all you learn. You never have fun out of not letting anybody know you
know something. You are very beautiful. I suppose, especial, you have the most beautiful hair I ever have seen. But you would be discontented if
there came anybody who did not--wie sagt man?--who did not acknowledge it. You are a play--author and heroine and actor, every one together. A
great play. But you could never just cook for some man."

"Why should I?" demanded Fran.



It came to Sam that he had heard this before.

Major Lockert, telling Fran about herself, delighting her by talking about her, stirring her to a desire for men who desired her.

Yes. Lockert had started this biological process which had set Fran alight, changed her into something altogether different from the Fran who had
sailed with him--Or had he? Perhaps her first romance had uncovered the real, the essential Fran, whom neither he nor herself had known in the
chill polite years of Zenith.

Damn Lockert!

And that aviator fellow, that Italian, Gioserro, had carried on the process. Damn Gioserro!

And Arnold Israel had really broken the delicate coating of ice over her. Damn Arnold Israel!

And now Kurt von Obersdorf, a man who could laugh, was going to lure her--Oh, damn Kurt!

Or should he damn Fran instead? Fran to whom life was a fashion-show.

Or damn the Sam Dodsworth who had thought carburetors more fascinating than the souls and bodies of women?

Anyway, he wouldn't have another Arnold Israel affair. Nipitinthebud. Certainly would!

He worked up a good sound rage at Kurt von Obersdorf, and had it ruined the moment Kurt came to him, with Fran in tow, after dinner.

"Mr. Dodsworth," said Kurt, "I have behaved outrageously to your wife. She thinks I have insulted her because I say that she is only making
believe when she thinks herself European--she is lovely, really, because she IS American! But I am so pro-American! I admire all things American
so much--huge buildings and central heating and adding-machines and Fords. Can I please take you about Berlin? I would be very happy!"

"Oh, we mustn't trouble you."

"But it would be a pleasure! Your cousins, the Biedners, they were so very kind to me when I first came from Vienna, and I have had so little
chance to repay. And the Herr Doctor is so busy with legal t'ings--aber fabelhaft! I have much more time. Let me have the pleasure of doing
something for the Herr Doctor!"

But from the way in which Kurt looked at Fran, Sam wondered if he might not have a livelier reason.

"Tomorrow--Sunday--are you free? May I take you out to a funny place for lunch?"

"That would be very kind of you," Sam said unenthusiastically.

"Splendid! I call for you at twelve."



Their suite in the Hotel Adlon looked on the eighteenth-century Pariser Platz, smacking of royal coaches and be-wigged footmen, and beyond the
Branderburger Tor, at the end of Unter den Linden, they could see the thick woods and little paths of the Tiergarten. This Sunday morning, after
the party at Herr Biedner's, was flooded with spring, such exultant and surprised reawakening as only Northern cities know. Sam bullied Fran out
of bed at eight-thirty, whistled while he shaved, devoured eggs in defiance of Fran's daily objection to American breakfasts in Europe (but she
always managed to eat them if they were ordered for her), and lured her into the Tiergarten. The statues of portentous armored Hohenzollerns
along the Sieges Allee they admired--neither of them had yet been properly told that the statues were vulgar and absurd--and they followed paths
beside brooks, over little bridges, along a lake, to the Coney Island minarets which leered at them over the wall about the Zoo. Quite lost, they
rounded the Zoo, stumbled on the Braustubl and had a second breakfast of Rostwurstchen and Munich beer thick as molasses. After the more languid
airs of Italy, their northern blood was roused by the spring breeze, and they came back to the Adlon chattering, smiling, content, just in time
to meet Graf Obersdorf in the Adlon lobby.

He bounced toward them as though he had known them a dozen years. "It is a good thing that I shall take you away today! It is such a beautiful
weather and if you are not dragged off where you can only loaf, then conscientious tourists like you would go see museums and palaces and all
kind of dreadful things!"

"I am NOT a conscientious tourist!" protested Fran.

Kurt shook his head. With his experience at the Internation Tourist Agency, he could not imagine an American who was not a collector of sights,
who did not work at travel as though it were a tournament with the honors to the person who could last out the largest number of museums. He was
as convinced that all Americans mark down credits for themselves in their Baedekers as are Americans that all Germans drink beer every evening.

He called a taxi. Sam was rather glad that Kurt had not wasted money on an apparently private limousine. If he were going to the country by
himself, Sam fancied, Kurt would go quite gaily in a motor 'bus, and be friendly with the driver before they got there. Already he had seen Kurt
plunge into lively conversations with the Adlon concierge, the news-stand man, two pages, and the taxi-driver; and most of the way out to the
rustic haven disastrously named Pichelsberg, Kurt told riotously of how frightened he had been all through the war, of how he had been captured
by a very small Italian with a very large rifle, and of how he had won a debate about the plays of Pirandello with the Italian major who had him
in for questioning.

The driver stopped by the road to tighten the fan-belt, and Kurt skipped out to watch him.

"Kind of like an American, this fellow--this count," said Sam. "Got a sense of humor, and don't take himself too seriously."

"Oh no, it's a very different thing," Fran insisted. "He's completely European. Americans are humorous to cover up their worry about things. They
think that what they do is immediately important and the world is waiting for it. The real European has a sense of a thousand years of ancestors
like himself behind him; he knows that his love affairs or his politics or his tragedies aren't very different from a hundred that have gone
before. And they aren't so violently ambitious for success--they want to fit into life as they find it rather than to move it about--and they'd
rather retire to a little cottage hidden among trees than to build a big stucco house on a hill for strangers to admire. Count Obersdorf doesn't
take himself seriously--but he takes Obersdorfs in general and Austrians in general and Europe in general seriously. And he IS rather a lamb,
isn't he! I'll be glad, though, when he feels easier with us and becomes his own real thoughtful self--when he understands that we're not his
'conscientious tourists'--imagine!--but the sort that--"

"Yeah, nice fella," said Sam.

He was irritated by her self-election to superiority; he was bothered by her desire to have this new suitor consider her superior. When Kurt had
scrambled back into the taxi she looked at him as fondly, as though he were a bright boy whom she wanted to amuse.

Sam sighed.

They left the taxicab at a path leading into thick scrub pines, and in the lazy warm day they ambled over pine needles to a shining river, the
Havel, and along it to an immense waste of outdoor restaurant, the Erster Schildhorn, a block of tables set under trees by the river, attended by
hysterically flying waiters. For all the haste of the waiters, it took a full hour and a half to lunch. And they liked it. In the spell of spring
air, of rustling water, of good heavy stultifying food, they grew relaxed, content to sit and drink beer forever, to forget cities and hotel
lobbies and motors and the social items in the New York Herald. Marinierte Herring and beer--noodle soup and beer--ham knuckle and butter-
dripping mashed potatoes and beer--Apfel Strudel and whipped cream and coffee--the stolid Sam, the fiery Fran, the mercurial Kurt, they all
gorged equally, and sat in the sun by the water, in a pleasant and anti-social coma, so deep a coma that Fran and Kurt did not talk and Sam was
only mildly aroused by the fabulous spectacle of a man solemnly riding out on the Havel in a boat propelled like a bicycle, sausage legs
revolving--a procedure as sacrilegious to Sam as rowing an automobile.

Without inquiring their desires--he was always a benevolent despot of a host--Kurt led them, when their eyes were cleared of the haze of food, on
a walk of miles along the river and into Potsdam.

Here, Kurt explained, lived a small colony of the old Junkers, the court circle of before-the-war, ex-ministers and generals and their proud
ladies, dispossessed by the republic. He was taking them to tea at the house of his aunt, the old Princess Drachenthal, whose husband, killed by
the misery of the war which he had labored to prevent, had been an ambassador.

"The Crown Prince often comes in for tea. You will like my aunt. She is a dear old thing," said Kurt.

"Speak English?" Sam muttered uneasily.

Kurt looked at him curiously. "She was brought up in England. Her mother was the daughter of the Duke of Wessex."

Sam marched on tireless. Fran, in coat and skirt smart as a cavalry uniform, walked with the swift nervousness of a tennis player, while Kurt
loped ahead and behind and to the side like an Airedale.

They passed country houses, square blocks of white, set in immense lawns; they passed beer gardens, festive and vocal; and came to the decorous
gray flat-fronted houses of Potsdam, sedate as Gramercy Park or a crescent in Bath. It was a clean, homelike, secure kind of country, and Sam
found himself liking its orderliness better than the romantic untidiness of Italy. And found himself not only liking but feeling at one with the
Germans.

He still had a war psychosis. He had expected to find in Germany despotic and "sabre-clanking" officials and hateful policemen; had worked up an
adequate rage in anticipation. He was nearly disappointed when he found the customs officials friendly, when he asked questions of a Berlin
policeman and was answered with a salute and directions in English, and when their room waiter at the Adlon remembered having seen them at the
Blackstone Hotel in Chicago! Now he admitted that in all of Europe, however interesting other nationals, however merry the Italians and keen the
French, he found only the British and the Germans his own sort of people. With them alone could he understand what they thought, how they lived,
and what they wanted of life.

He liked this Sunday stream of Berliners on excursion--vast families with babies and rye bread and pickles and cold ham; eager young men and
girls, hatless, the cropped girls rather masculine as far down as the neck but thoroughly feminine below; and occasional strayed Bavarians
faithful to green hats with feathers and deer-horn ornaments, green jackets, green leather shorts, and rucksacks--the rucksacks not necessarily
containing anything but a handkerchief, since to a true Bavarian a rucksack is worn not so much for portage as for elementary modesty; as some
races conceal the face and some the chest so the Bavarians conceal the small of the back.

Fran protested against the infrequency of "native costumes"; she pointed out that despite the occasional Bavarians, most of these excursioners
could not be told from a crowd in America. But that, after months of constantly eating the plum pudding of novelty, was precisely what Sam liked
about them, and he was less homesick this afternoon than for weeks; he developed a liking for Count Obersdorf; he felt that the walk was "taking
the kinks out of his legs"; he was glad that Fran had a lively companion in Kurt; and he came cheerfully up to the gloomy brown mansion of the
Princess Drachenthal.



She was a fragile old lady, like a porcelain cup, and she seemed translucent as porcelain. She called Fran "my dear," and she welcomed Sam to
Germany. Apparently Kurt had telephoned about the Dodsworths; she said that she was glad to have a "great American industrialist" see Germany
first hand.

"My poor stricken country needs the co-operation of America. We look to you--and if you do not give back the glance we shall have to look to
Russia."

She was apparently convinced that Sam had come in a limousine; she asked whether he had sent his chauffeur round back for his tea; and when she
learned that Kurt and these visiting dignitaries had actually lunched at a low Volk Lokal and walked into Potsdam, she shook her head, as one not
understanding. There were so many things the little old Princess did not understand in these machine-devoured days, she who as a girl had known
the security of an old cow-smelling country house in Silesia and of a rose-red Tudor mansion in Wiltshire, in a day when counts did not work in
tourist agencies, and America was a wilderness to which rebellious peasants ran off, quite unaccountably and naughtily. But there was the reality
of breeding in her, and she tried to understand this bulky "great American industrialist" who was so silently pleasant, this vivacious American
woman with the marvelous ruffled blouse peeping from her little blue jacket, the ageless American girl whose gay poise reduced the Count
Obersdorf to the position of rattle-headed boy.

Sam perceived the worn elegance of the Princess, took pride in Fran's deference, and found restfulness in the drawing-room, which had very bad
gilt chairs, an over-ornamented porcelain stove with very bad plaques of bounding shepherdesses, very bad pictures of stag-hunting and moonlight,
far too many glass cases with Prince Drachenthal's decorations, far too many faded cabinet photographs of the '80's and '90's and yet, bad in all
its details, was suggestive of aristocratic generations.

A retired German general came in for tea, with a refugee Russian colonel-baron, a Frau von Something who was apparently so distinguished that no
one thought of explaining her, and a handsome fervent boy, the Princess's grand-son, who was taking his examinations in law at the University of
Bonn and who wanted, he said, to go to America. They were free of Renee de Penable's pretentiousness, as simple as a group at Tub Pearson's,
decided Sam. No, they were simpler, for Tub would have to be humorous for the benefit of the ladies and gentlemen, no matter how it hurt. Kurt
von Obersdorf had dropped all of the slight skittishness into which he fell when he pranced for Fran's benefit, and he was discussing Bolshevism
with the Russian ex-colonel.

They somehow lured Sam into talking. He discovered himself being eloquent about chrome steel and General Motors stock, while Fran, in a corner,
was deferentially lively with Princess Drachenthal.

"Sort of like coming home--no, it's more like coming home than coming home will be, because Fran is satisfied here. Oh, Lord, WILL she be
satisfied in Zenith when--Oh, quit fussing! Course she will!" reflected the inner Sam, while the outer Mr. Dodsworth sagely informed them, "--and
in my opinion the greatest fallacy in world-marketing today is a competition between American, German, French, English and Italian cars in South
America, instead of all of us combining to educate the South Americans to use more motors and especially to help them to build more through
highways that would tap every square mile of the continent--"



He wondered why Fran had been uneasy, in Venice, with Edith Cortright, when she was suavely at ease with Princess Drachenthal, far more of a
personage.

"Because she was jealous? Because Mrs. Cortright, an American, has a position and a flat in a palace and everything? Or because she felt Mrs.
Cortright could catch her easier when she was bluffing? No! That's unfair! Fran is no bluffer! Look how lovely she is to the old Princess, and
how the Count and the General and everybody falls for her!"



They rode back to Berlin in the train, rather quietly. Sam hinted that Kurt must have an engagement for the evening, but Kurt protested, almost
childishly, "Oh no! Are you bored with me? You must let me take you to dinner!"

"Of course, we'd be ENCHANTED," said Fran, and Sam, prodded with a look, achieved, "Mighty nice of you, Count."

"If you really like, I will show you a nice restaurant, and maybe later--if you are not too tired, Madame--we could go a little while to some
place to dance. You dance, I know, like an angel."

"Next to Carry Nation and Susan B. Anthony," said Fran gravely, "I am probably the best dancer in America."

"They are famous dancers?" said Kurt.

"Yes, they're so good they're known in America as the Gold Dust twins," explained Sam.

"Really? And you dance like them, Madame? I shall have to be very good!" said Kurt.



While Fran dressed for dinner, Sam and Kurt had side-car cocktails in the Adlon Bar. Sam liked the scarlet Chinese Chippendale walls, with little
Burmese figures; the somewhat obese Bacchanalians in the painting over the bar; the corners with settees comforting to a drinking man; and the
fact that here was one place in Europe where no foreign language--i.e., any language save American, with traces of English--was ever heard.

At the bar were always half a dozen of the American business men stationed in Berlin--shipping-men, bankers, representatives of the movies, and
for the American journalists it was a club, where they exchanged tips on Russia and Roumania, Breitscheid's coming speech and the Zentrum Party's
capture of the schools.

"I like this; I see myself sneaking in here pretty often," Sam promised himself.

He forgot the bar in attention to Kurt's confidences. He had never known any one so frankly emotional about his friends as Kurt, nor one so eager
to be liked.

"Shall I be rude if I talk about Mrs. Dodsworth?" urged Kurt. "She is so lovely! A kind of Arctic beauty, shining like ice. And yet so very warm-
hearted and gracious and fun-ny. And such gallantry--an explorer--but very elegant--like in a Roman, with many bearers and dressing for dinner in
the jungle. One feels she could do anything she wanted to enough. Forever young. She is--perhaps thirty-five?--one would say she was twenty-
eight. Our European women are very gemutlich, they are easy to be with, they wait on us, but not many among them have a sword-like quality like
Mrs. Dodsworth and such high spirits--Oh, I hope I am not rude! She is lucky to be accompany with a great red Indian like you--a chief, sagt
man?--who can guide and protect her!"

Sam made the most awkward sound--something between "Thanks" and "Like hell!"

"As I said once, I admire America very much, and it is so kind of you two to come and bummel with me! And meet my friends."

"Kindness all yours, Count. Good Lord! Mighty nice of you to let us meet such nice people as the Princess and--"

"Oh, don't call me 'Count.' I am not a count--there aren't any more counts--the republic has come to stay--I am just a clerk for the I.T.A.! If I
am only something with a title, then I would better be nothing! I shall be glad if you call me 'Kurt.' We Austrians are almost like you Americans
in our fondness to call by the first name among people we like. Yes."

"Well, that's mighty nice of you--"

Sam wished that he could warm up. But he was conscious of waiting for Fran--of Kurt's waiting. He was annoyed at the prospect of again being
admitted as Fran's patient escort, as he had been in Madame de Penable's gang. Yet he felt that Kurt was honest in professing admiration for both
of them, and he forced himself to sound amiable:

"I guess one of the things we Americans fool ourselves about is claiming that we're the only really hospitable race in the world. Don't believe
any stranger in America ever was received in a more friendly way than Mrs. Dodsworth and--than Fran and I have been here and in England. Mighty
nice!"

Then Fran was upon them, in amethyst velvet, and with velvet she had put on a patronizing grandeur. The simple-hearted Kurt was confused; it took
him ten minutes to understand that she was not showing displeasure in dropping her jollity, but merely playing a different role. Entreated to
join them in a cocktail, she condescended. "It would be ever so amusing to have an aperitif in the bar, but do you really think one COULD?"

"Oh yess, it is quite proper . . . almost!" Kurt begged.

Sam said nothing. He had seen Fran enjoying too many drinks in too many bars, and not calling them "aperitifs," either.

She was full of high life amid the upholstery and expensive food of Horcher's, and she generously commended the Rheinlachs. But somehow she came
out of it--somehow, sometime, Kurt began calling her "Fran," and she admitted him with "Kurt"; she laughed without admiring her own laughter,
and, permitting them an entr'acte during her personal drama of The Sophisticated American Lady Abroad, she allowed them to be human and cheerful
again. Kurt talked, less flamboyantly now, more naturally, and Sam realized that however Kurt might insist that he was no nobleman now but only a
tourist-agency clerk, Kurt belonged to the once powerful of the earth and, but for the war, would be magnificence in a castle. His father had
been gentleman in waiting and friend to the Emperor, his great-uncle, the field-marshal, had organized the war against Prussia, and he himself,
as a boy, had played with the Archduke Michael.

Sam wondered whether, however genuine his family, Kurt was one of these fictitional adventurers who would be likely to borrow money, and to
introduce swindlers to a rustic from the Middle West. He rejected it. No. If he knew anything about people, this man was honest, unselfishly fond
of entertaining people. And the Biedners vouched for him, and to Fran's father, the canny old brewer, a Biedner had been almost as beautiful and
dependable and generally Biblical as stock in a national bank.

Obviously Fran had no doubts whatever about Kurt von Obersdorf. In the glow of his stories about the frivolous days of old Vienna, she forgot her
own charms. She consented when Kurt proposed that they go to the Konigin and dance; she consented when he proposed that they leave that
decorative but packed haunt of the more sporting Junkers and venture to the vulgar Cabaret von Vetter Kaspar.

The wit there was devoted chiefly to the water-closet, and Sam was astonished to hear Fran shamelessly joining in Kurt's whooping laughter. Of
course he laughed himself; but still--Well, this fellow Obersdorf, he enjoyed things himself so much that he made you feel like laughing at--
well, at things that people didn't talk about in Zenith, anyway not in mixed company--But still--



They came out of the cabaret at one in the morning.

"Now just one more place!" Kurt demanded. "Such a place as I do not think you will see in America. Shrecklich! Such curious men hang out there
and dance with one another. but you must see it once."

"Oh, it's pretty late, Kurt. I think we'd better be getting home," said Sam. An evening of stories, and a bottle of champagne, had warmed him to
a point where it seemed natural to call Kurt by his first name, but not to a point where he forgot the joys of a good soft pillow.

"Yes, it IS late," said Fran, but vaguely.

"Oh no!" Kurt begged. "Life is so short! To waste it in sleeping! And you are here a so small time. Then you will wander on and perhaps I shall
never see you again! Oh, you did enjoy today, did you not? We are good friends, nicht? Let us not be serious! Please! Life is so short!"

"Oh, of course we'll come!" rippled Fran; and, though Sam grumbled to himself, "Life'll be a damn' sight shorter if I don't get some sleep once
in a while!" he looked agreeable as they heaved themselves into a taxicab.

Their new venture in restaurants was called "Die Neuste Ehe"--"The Latest Style in Marriage"--and after two minutes' view of it, Sam concluded
that he preferred the old style. Here, in a city in which, according to the sentiment of the American comic weeklies, all males were thick as
pancakes and stolid as plow-horses, was a mass of delicate young men with the voices of chorus girls, dancing together and whispering in corners,
young men with scarves of violet and rose, wearing bracelets and heavy symbolic rings. And there was a girl in lavender chiffon--only from the
set of her shoulders Sam was sure that she was a man.

As they entered, the bartender, and a very pretty and pink-cheeked bartender he was, waved his towel at them and said something in a shrill
playful German which Sam took to signify that Kurt was a charming person worthy of closer acquaintance, that he himself was a tower of steel and
a glory upon the mountains.

It was new to Sam.

He stood gaping. His fists half clenched. The thick, reddish hair on the back of his hands bristled. But it was not belligerence he felt--it was
fear of something unholy. He saw that Fran was equally aghast; proudly he saw that she drew nearer his stalwartness.

Kurt looked at the jocund bartender; quickly he looked at Fran and Sam; and he murmured, "This is a silly place. Come! Come! We go some place
else!"

Already the manager was upon them, smirking, inviting them in two languages to give up their wraps. Kurt said something to him in a rapid,
hissing German--something that made the manager sneer and back off--something so hateful and contemptuous that Sam reflected, "This Kurt is quite
a fellow, after all. Wouldn't be such a bad guy to have with you in a scrap!"

As Kurt lifted the heavy brocade curtain before the street door to usher them out, the bartender, in a cat-call voice, shouted something final.
Kurt's jaw tightened. It was a good jaw-line. But he did not turn and, out on the pavement, his face was full of an apology that was almost
suffering as he begged of Fran:

"I am so sorry. I had never been there. I had just heard of it. I did not think they would be so dreadful. Oh, you will never forgive me!"

"But I didn't mind them!" Fran protested. "I think it would have been amusing to watch them, for a little while."

Kurt insisted, "Oh no, no, no! Of course you were shocked! Come! There is another place I do know, over the street. You will show me you forgive
me by coming--"

They danced till three, at which hour every one in the cafe was sleepy except Kurt. The orchestra went home and, to the cheers of the grimly
merry groups who were left slumbering over their champagne, Kurt trotted forward and played the piano like a vaudeville performer, and they all
obediently awakened for the last dregs of joviality. A monocled officer-like German begged Fran to dance, and Sam was able to snatch three
minutes of secret sleep.

He was gratified when, after he had grumbled, "Now we've GOT to go home," Fran and Kurt took him seriously enough to consent.

It was raining, and the street was like the inside of a polished steel cylinder. A late taxicab cruised up, but the doorman and his faithful big
umbrella had gone home. Kurt whipped off his coat, wrapped it about Fran and, in shirtsleeves, stood waiting till Sam was inside the cab. . . .
And he WOULD sit on the little folding seat and he wouldn't let them take him home, but escorted them to the Adlon, babbling, "It was fun, wasn't
it! You do forgive me for the Neuste Ehe, don't you! It was a von-derful day, wasn't it! And you will come by me Wednesday evening for a little
dinner to meet some friends? Oh, you must!"

Yes, they would, thank you very much--



In the extreme drowsiness of their room, Fran hinted, "You enjoyed it, didn't you, darling?"

"Yes, everything except the last hour or so. Got pretty sleepy."

"Kurt is a darling, don't you think?"

"Yes, he's a nice fellow. Mighty kind."

"But Heavens, what a bossy person he is! He simply demanded that I be shocked at that Den of Vice, and I had to do my best to please him--and you
too, you pure-minded males! Well, he's a nice boy, and so are you, and I'm going to sleep till noon I LIKE Berlin!"



CHAPTER 23


Three days of museums, of art galleries, of palaces, of the Zoo. They went to Sans Souci, where Fran talked of Voltaire (she really had read
"Candide") and Sam thought in a homesick way of the Sans Souci Gardens development in Zenith and snapped at himself that it was time to clinch
with Fran, to make her come home and begin a new life of "making things."

They saw nothing of Kurt von Obersdorf--he merely telephoned to them eight or ten times and made them go out and see things. He so insisted that
they see Molnar's "Spiel im Schloss" that they sulkily went, though by now Sam had convinced himself that he was right in thinking he didn't care
greatly for plays in a language he didn't understand, and though Fran, exhausted by the florid endearments which had been poured upon her at a
women's tea given by Frau Dr. Biedner, for once in her life wanted to go to bed.

She said that she understood every word of "Spiel im Schloss."

Sam said that he guessed it was pretty fine acting all right, and he thought he'd just slip down-stairs and have a nightcap in the bar.

He fell to talking with an American journalist who knew Ross Ireland; he had several nightcaps; and in general he enjoyed himself. When he
slipped into their room, Fran was asleep. So, as he put it, he had got away with it, and he felt as exultant as a boy who has played hooky and
discovers afterward that teacher has been sick all day.



In England Fran had learned to say Lift for Elevator, Zed for Zee, La-BOR-atory for LA-boratory, Schenario for Scenario, and Shi for Ski. And
before she had ever left America she had been able to point her Europeanism by keeping her fork in her left hand. But now she added to her
accomplishments the ability to make a European 7 by crossing it, and ardently she crossed every 7, particularly in letters to friends in Zenith,
who were thus prevented from knowing what figure she was using.



The four great mysteries of life in post-war Berlin, not to be explained by the most diligent searching of history and economics and Lutheran
theology, are all connected with apartment-houses, and thus are they: Why can no visitor get into an apartment-house after eight in the evening
without protocols? Why are the automatic elevators kept locked, so that no visitor can use them? Why does no Berlin landlord provide modern
locks, but always compel his tenants to carry a bunch of keys comparable in size to those used in the Middle Ages for closing cathedrals? Why
does a landlord who has spent a hundred thousand marks on a marble staircase (with neat gilt edgings and mosaic inserts) refuse to spend a mark a
night to provide lights in the hallways? They are dark. They are very dark. A light may be had by pressing a button, which provides illumination
for a time, but in all the history of Berlin that time of illumination has never been known to last while a visitor climbed from the ground floor
to the top.

On the top floor of an apartment house on the Brucken Allee lived Kurt von Obersdorf, and on the vertiginous way up to it Sam pointed out these
four mysteries, and was pleased to have Fran agree with him.

They were received by Kurt's maid. She was an ancient thing, rusty and feeble and in some doubt as to what to do with Sam's hat and stick. While
she puttered, Sam looked about. The apartment had a narrow corridor, the drab plaster rather flaked, and adorned with a yellow-stained engraving
of St. Stefan's Dom in Vienna. Over a doorway were two crossed swords.

Suddenly Kurt bounced out on them, slimmer and looser than ever in dinner clothes, took Fran's wrap himself, spoke to the creeping servant with
that mixture of scolding and family fondness which only a European can manage, and prattled:

"I am so glad! I was afraid you would be angry with me for my clumsiness about Die Neuste Ehe the other evening and punish me by not coming. Let
me tell you who are the other guests. There are your cousins, Dr. and Frau Biedner, and the Baroness Volinsky--she is such a pretty girl, a
Hungarian; her husband is a Pole, a terrible fellow; he is not coming, thank God!; and Theodor von Escher, the violinist--he is such a VON-DERFUL
violinist!--and his wife, Minna--you will fall in love with her, and Professor and Frau Braut--he is professor of economics in Berlin University,
such a brain, he knows more America than ANYBODY--he will prove to you that in two hundred years America will be a wilderness again, you will
like him so much! They are a funny mix' lot, but all speak English, and I wanted you to meet different kinds. Fran, you look like a heaven's
angel in ivory! Kom' mal"

He ushered them, as though they were royalty, into a small, shabby, friendly apartment in which three people seemed a crowd. The chairs of old
brown leather were hollowed and listed; the couch was covered with what Sam viewed as "some kind of yellow silk," though Fran whispered later
that it was "perfectly priceless old damask." The pictures were largely photographs of friends, officers in Austrian uniform. But there were
shelves of wildly disarranged books, and Sam noted later that they were in German, English, Italian, and French. He observed a dozen ponderous
and dismaying volumes on American law and banking and history, the sort of tomes which he had always admired in libraries and shunned in the
home.

When the door to the right was opened for a moment, Sam saw a narrow bedroom with a mean camp bedstead, racks of gorgeous ties, a picture of a
beautiful girl, a crucifix, and nothing much else. That, with the little dining-room and a mysterious kitchen somewhere and a bathroom old enough
to be historic, seemed to make up the domain of the head of the house of Obersdorf.

There were cocktails, agitatedly mixed by Kurt in a glass pitcher, and there was dinner (not very good) and conversation (tremendous). Under
Kurt's hectic captaincy, there was none of the timid burgher decorum of dinner at the Biedners'; also there was more to drink, including an
Assmannshauser champagne which made Sam determined to explore the Rhine Valley. Any one who didn't shout from time to time received Kurt's
worried attention. Kurt was convinced that a person who was silent in his house had either ceased to like him--and probably for good reasons, for
some hideous sin he had unconsciously committed against them--or else was suffering from a hidden malady which ought to be treated out of hand.
But between the shouts, most of the conversation was carried on by Professor Braut.

When he first surveyed that learned man, who left with you the impression that he had whiskers even in his eyes, Sam had decided, "This bearded
beauty may know something about economics in Germany, but I'll bet he doesn't know anything about the land of the safety-razor!"

Professor Braut turned to him. His accent was much thicker than Kurt's. "Please," he said, "I vonder if you coult tell me something I am trying
to learn about agrarian movements in America."

"I don't know very much about them," said Sam. "Have you been in America?"

"Oh, a liddle--before the war. I was a professor in Harvard for a year, and in Leland Stanford a year, and I traveled maybe a year, but of course
that is nothing to get any real knowledge of your great country."

Then, at Kurt's suggestion, Professor Braut gave a minute history of the Non-partisan League in North Dakota.

Through it he turned constantly to Sam for confirmation, and Sam--who knew very little about North Dakota and precisely nothing about the Non-
partisan League--nodded blandly. At the end, Sam addressed himself strongly:

"He knows more about your own country than you do! Sambo, you know nothing. Ignorant! I wish I hadn't given up thirty years to motor-cars. And I
haven't really learned much here in Europe. A tiny bit about architecture and a little less about wine and cooking and a few names of hotels. And
that's all!"

While Kurt chattered of the adventures of Archduke Michael as a chauffeur to a Hungarian Jew, Sam had a vision of learning and of learned men, of
men who knew things with precision, without emotional prejudice, and who knew things which really affected the broad stream of human life; who
considered the purposes of a thousand statesmen, the function of a thousand bacteria, the significance of a thousand Egyptian inscriptions, or
perhaps the pathology of a thousand involved and diseased minds, as closely as he himself had considered the capacities of a hundred salesmen and
engineers and clerks in the Revelation Company. He saw groups of such learned men, in Berlin, in Rome, in Basle, in both Cambridges, in Paris, in
Chicago. They would not be chatterers. Oh, he pondered, probably some of them would be glib and merry enough over a glass of beer, but when it
came to their own subjects, they would speak slowly, for to any given question there would be so many answers among which to select. They would
not vastly please Fran; they would not all of them be dancers of elegance, and perhaps they would fail to choose quite the right waistcoats. They
would look insignificant and fuzzy, like Professor Braut, or dry and spindling. And he would be proud to have their recognition--beyond all
recognitions of wealth or title.

How was it that he had not known more of them? In Yale, teachers had been obstacles which a football-player had to get past in order to carry out
his duty of "doing something for old Yale." New York was to him exclusively a city of bankers, motor dealers, waiters, and theater employees. On
this European venture which was to have opened new lives to him, he had seen only more waiters, English spinsters marooned in hotels, and guides
with gold teeth.

Scholars. Men who knew. Suddenly he felt that he might have been such a man. What had kept him from it? Oh, he had been cursed by being popular
in college, and by having a pretty wife who had to be surrounded with colored lights--

No, he rebuked himself. He couldn't get away with excuses like that! In the first place, he was a dirty dog to be ungrateful for having been
popular and for having had such a glorious girl as his Fran--look at her now, laughing about the sanctity of the sausage in the German social
scheme--look at her, reducing the Count of Obersdorf, kin of princesses and maybe kings, to bouncing admiration! No, he'd been lucky.

Besides! A fellow did not become things--anyway not after five or six or seven years of age. He simply was things! If he had had the capacity to
be a savant, nothing would have prevented.

Or--

Suddenly he felt better about it. Was it possible that in some involved, unelucidated way, he himself was a savant in fields not admitted by the
academicians as scholarship? He told himself that in the American motor-world he was certainly not known merely as a pedler and as a financial
acrobat, but as the authority on automobile-designing, as the first man to advocate four-wheel brakes. Hm. DID that constitute him a scholar, or-
-

Or possibly an artist? He had created something! He had no pictures in the academies, no books to be bound in levant, no arias nor flimsy
furniture named after him, but every one of the twenty million motors on the roads of America had been influenced by his vision, a quarter of a
century ago, of long, clean streamlines!

Yes! And it didn't hurt a man to be a little proud of some honest thing he had done! It gave him courage to go on. Especially with a wife like
Fran, who was always criticizing--

Good God, had he really become confirmed, since the case of Arnold Israel, in this habit of seeing Fran not as his loyal companion but as a
dreaded and admired enemy, to placate whom was his object in life? Was this the truth about his wanderings, all his future?

He hastily got out of that torturing wonder by sending his mind back to scholarship, while he looked intelligent and placidly ate Backhuhn and
seemed to listen to Theodor von Escher on his own superiority to Kreisler.

Could he ever attain scholarship now? Was it too infantile a fancy to think of becoming the first great historian of motors, historian of
something which was, after all, more important in social evolution than twenty Battles of Waterloo? Or could he learn something of architecture?
For he really was a little tired of motors. They meant, just now, sitting at a desk in the Revelation offices. Could he really make better Sans
Souci Gardens?

Anyway, he wasn't going on just being a Cook's tourist, rather less important to Fran than concierges and room-waiters. He'd do SOMETHING--

Or was this inner glow, so exciting and so rare--was it merely a reflection of drinking champagne and being warmed by Kurt's hospitality? Was his
formless determination to "do something" and his belief that he still could "do something" only, in essence, like the vows of a drunkard?

"No, by God," swore Samuel Dodsworth.

"It isn't that. A drink or two, and a jolly bunch, do loosen me up. I'm slow at starting--Hm! Very slow! Here I am fifty-two years old, and just
this last year or so I've wanted to be more than a money-coining machine. . . . To be SOMETHING. Though God knows what! . . . Eh?" (He answered
furiously a chorus of accusers.) "I have been a good citizen! And I have brought up my children! And I have paid my debts! And I have done the
job that was first at hand! And I have loved my friends! And now I'm not going to stand back the rest of my life and be satisfied and dead--dead
on my feet--dead!

"I wish I'd known Kurt before. I'd like to've gone off for a few weeks with him and Ross Ireland. Only I ought to've done it ten years ago, and
now it's--But I won't LET it be too late!

"Hm! YOU let! It's what Fran will let her dear husband do--

"Why is it I always go back to that--as though it was she that cramped my style, instead of my own lack of brains?"

And, annoyed by the way in which thoughts scamper around in circles if you once let them loose, Sam came abruptly out of his meditation and was
again the large and prosperous American husband of a lovely American wife, a worthy husband listening with meekness to the conversation of her
European friends.



Sam had noted, and been rather surprised at it, that Kurt von Obersdorf did not condescend to a mere university professor, as any American of
good family would have done. For all his love of gossiping, Kurt listened humbly when Professor Braut really got going, like a liner towed out
through little ripples of talk, tugs yanking at its sulky ponderousness, but finally plunging into the long rollers of conversation.

Braut was lecturing Fran as though she were a rather small seminar. He did violence, while he talked, to the English W and V and T, yet in his
earnestness, his was no comic dialect:

"Emotionally, as a Prussian, with the symbols of blood and iron, of Bismarck and Luther and der alte Fritz, I detest the prostituted elegance of
Paris and the Italians, like children playing at Empire. Yet all the time I think of myself--most people like me think of themselves--more as
Europeans than as German or French or Polish or Hungarian; we think of ourselves, whatever family differences we may have, as standing together
against the Russians (who are certainly not European but Asiatic), against the British, the Americans--however we admire them--the Latin
Americans, the Asiatics, the colonists. The European culture is aristocratic. I do not mean that boastfully; I do not speak of famous old
families, like that of our friend Graf Obersdorf here. I mean that we are aristocratic, as against democratic, in that we believe that the nation
is proudest and noblest and most exalted which has the greatest number of really great men--like Einstein and Freud and Thomas Mann--and that
ordinary, undistinguished people (who may be, mind you, counts or kings, as well as servant maids) are happier in contributing to produce such
great men than in having more automobiles and bath-tubs.

"And by the aristocratic tradition of the real Europe I do not mean any hauteur. I think perhaps I have seen more rudeness to servants--as well,
of course, as more rudeness to masters--in America than anywhere in Europe. Servants here are not so well paid, but they have more security and
more respect. An American thinks of a good cook as a low person; a European respects him as an artist.

"The European, the aristocrat, feels that he is responsible to past generations to carry on the culture they have formed. He feels that
graciousness, agreeable manners, loyalty to his own people, are more important than wealth; and he feels that to carry on his tradition, he must
have knowledge--much knowledge. Why, think of what the young European must learn, if he is not to be ashamed of himself!

"He must know at least two languages, and if he does not know them, his friends are sorry that he is so poor a linguist. He must have--even
though he may plan to be a stock-broker or an importer, or sell your automobiles, Mr. Dodsworth--he must have some understanding of music,
painting, literature, so that he will really enjoy a concert or an exhibition of pictures, and not go there to make an impression. His manners
must be so good that he can be careless. He must know the politics of all the great countries--I would bet you, Mrs. Dodsworth, that my four
grandsons, though they have never been in America or England, know as much about President Coolidge and Secretary Hoover and Governor Smith as
most Americans of their age.

"They must know cooking and wines. They themselves may prefer to live on bread and cheese, but they must be able to give their guests good
dinners, and at not much cost--oh, so terribly little cost most of us can afford now since the war! And most of all, they must understand women,
and the beginning of that--I t'ink Mrs. Dodsworth will agree--is really to like women, and to like them to BE women, and not imitation men!

"That is a small bit of the required training of the real European--German or Swiss or Dutch or whatefer! And that training helps to keep us
together, understanding each other, no matter how foolish we are and suicide with Great Wars! However we may oppose it, we are all at heart Pan-
Europeans. We feel that the real Continental Europe is the last refuge of individuality, leisure, privacy, quiet happiness. We think that good
talk between intelligent friends in a cafe in Vienna or Paris or Warsaw is more pleasant and important than having septic tanks or electric dish-
washing machines.

"America wants to turn us into Good Fellows, all provided with the very best automobiles--and no private place to which we can go in them. When I
think of America I always remember a man who made me go out to a golf club and undress in a locker room, where quite uninvited men came up and
made little funny jokes about Germany and about my being a professor! And Russia wants to turn us into a machine for the shaving off of all the
eccentricities which do not belong to the lowest common denominator. And Asia and Africa do not t'ink that human life and the sweetness of human
life matter. But Europe, she believes that a Voltaire, a Beethoven, a Wagner, a Keats, a Leuwenhoeck, a Flaubert, give drama and meaning to life,
and that they are worth preserving--they and the people who understand and admire them! Europe! The last refuge, in this Fordized world, of
personal dignity. And we believe that is worth fighting for! We are menaced by the whole world. Yet perhaps we shall endure . . . perhaps!

"Some of us think that perhaps we shall prevail even against Americanization--which I may venture to define as a theological belief that it is
more important to have your purchases tidily rung up on a cash-register than to purchase what you want. (And mind you--I am not so anti-American
as I seem--I quite understand that the mystic process of 'Americanization' is being carried on as much by German industrialists and French
exporters and English advertising-men as it is by born Yankees!) I think the echt Europe may be able to endure. For I remember always of Greece
and Rome. Rome was the America of ancient history; Greece the perhaps over-cultured Continental Europe. Vi et armis, Rome conquered. Yet it was
Greek architecture, Greek philosophy, and its gracefulness of body which revivified Europe in the Renaissance, more than Roman law.

"So! I deliver a lecture. Hasslich! Yet I must finish. To be clear, when I speak of the European you must understand that I speak of a very
small, select, special class, which is far nearer to other members of that class in foreign nations than it is to most of its own countrymen. The
beer-sodden peasant in a Gastzimmer at a country inn, or here in Berlin dancing in masses at Die Neue Welt, is not a European in that special
sense. Neither is the bustling young business man on the Friedrichstrasse, or on the Rue de Rivoli, who is trying to sell vulgar porcelain or
shoddy silk so fast as he can. Both of them would gladly emigrate to America and change leisure for automobiles. And also there are a few people
born in America who DO belong to what I call 'Europeans'--your author Mrs. Edith Wharton, I imagine, must be so. But wherever they were born,
there is this definite class, standing for a definite aristocratic culture--and most Americans who think they have 'seen Europe' go home without
any idea at all of its existence and what it stands for, and they perceive of Europe just loud-tongued guides, and passengers in trains looking
unfriendly and reading Uhu or Le Rire. They have missed only everything that makes Europe!"

Sam was surprised to find himself answering:

"Yes, that's about true. America thinks of the Europeans as a bunch of restaurant cashiers trying to do us on exchange--thinks of Europe as dead-
-nothing but pictures by men that lived three hundred years ago. We forget your Freud and Einstein--yes, and European aeroplane constructors, and
this Youth movement in Germany, and the French tennis players that beat us. But you have just as untrue an idea of America. All over Berlin, in
the book-stores, I see books about America; titles like 'The Dollar Land.' Well, I'll bet the French peasant that sticks the centimes away in the
sock, and the German farmer, love the dollar ten times as much as the average American. We love to make money, but we love to spend it. We're all
like sailors on a spree. We have to have every parrot that's on sale on the waterfront. And--

"Why do you suppose so many hundreds of thousands of Americans come to Europe? Not more than one out of a hundred Europeans who do go to America
ever goes there to learn, to see what we have. And after all, a Woolworth Building or a Chicago Tribune Building or a Ford plant or a Grand
Canyon or a Sharon, Connecticut--and incidentally a mass of 110,000,000 people--might be worth studying. You of all people, Professor, know that
most Europeans go to America just to make money. But why are the Americans here? Oh, a few of 'em to get social credit for it, back home, or to
sell machinery, but most of 'em, bless 'em, come here as meekly as school-boys, to admire, to learn!

"What most Europeans think of America! Because we were a pioneer nation, mostly busy with farming and cod-fishing and chewing tobacco, a hundred
years ago, Europe thinks we still are. The pictures of Americans in your comic papers indicate to me that Europe sees all Americans as either
moneylenders who lie awake nights thinking of how they can cheat Europe, or farmers who want to spit tobacco on the Cathedral of St. Mark, or
gunmen murdering Chicagoans in their beds. My guess is that it all comes from the tradition that Europeans started a hundred years ago. Here a
few weeks back, when we were in Vienna, I picked up 'Martin Chuzzlewit' and waded through it. Funny, mind you, his picture of America a hundred
years ago. But he shows a bunch of people along the Ohio River and in New York who were too lazy to scratch, who--"

"Sam!" warned Fran, but he strode on unregarding.

"--were ignorant as Hottentots and killed each other with revolvers whenever they felt like it, with no recourse. In fact, every American that
Dickens shows in the book is a homicidal idiot, except one--and he wanted to live abroad! Well! You can't tell me that a degenerate bunch like
that could have taken the very river-bottom swamps that Dickens describes, and in three generations have turned 'em into the prosperous cement-
paved powerful country that they are today! Yet Europe goes on reading hack authors who still steal their ideas from 'Martin Chuzzlewit' and
saying, 'There, I told you so!' Say, do you realize that at the time Dickens described the Middlewest--my own part of the country--as entirely
composed of human wet rags, a fellow named Abe Lincoln and another named Grant were living there; and not more than maybe ten years later, a boy
called William Dean Howells (I heard him lecture once at Yale, and I notice that they still read his book about Venice IN Venice) had been born?
Dickens couldn't find or see people like that. Perhaps some European observers today are missing a few Lincolns and Howellses!

"The kind of pride that you describe, Professor, as belonging to the real aristocratic Europeans, is fine--I'm all for it. And I want to see just
that kind of pride in America. Maybe we've gone too fast to get it. But as I wander around Europe, I find a whale of a lot of Americans who are
going slow and quiet, and who are thinking--and not all of 'em artists and professors, by a long shot, but retired business men. We are getting a
tradition that--Good Lord! You said you'd been lecturing. I'm afraid I have, too!"

Kurt cried "To America!" and adumbrated "Yes, America is THE hope of--And of course the paradise of women."

Fran exploded:

"Oh, that is the one most idiotic fallacy about America--and it's just as much believed in America as in Europe--and it's just as much mouthed by
women as by men--and deep down they don't believe a word of it! It's my profound conviction that there's no woman living, no real normal woman,
who doesn't want a husband who can beat her, if she deserves it--no matter though she may be president of a college or an aviator. Mind you, I
don't say she wants to be beaten, but she wants a man who CAN beat her! He must be a man whom she respects! She must feel that his work, or his
beautiful lack of work, is more important than she is."

Sam looked at her in mild astonishment. If anything had been certain about their controversies, it had been that Fran ought to be more important
to him than his work. He tried to remember just where she had got this admirable dissertation on feminism. Certain of the phrases he traced to
Renee de Penable.

"And that's just what you do have in Europe, and what we don't have in America. Mind you, I'm not speaking of Sam and myself--he's awfully
competent at beating me when I deserve it!"

Her jocular glance at Sam was admiringly observed by all assembled.

"I'm just speaking generally. Oh, the American wife of the prosperous classes--sometimes even among people who have no money visible to the naked
eye--has privileges for which the European woman would envy her. She doesn't have to beg her husband for money. She has a joint bank-account. If
she wants to study singing or advocate anti-vivisection or open a tea-room or dance with nasty young men at hotels, it never occurs to him to
object. And so she's supposed to be free and happy. Happy! Do you know why the American husband gives his wife so much freedom? Because he
doesn't CARE what she does--because he isn't sufficiently interested in her to care! To the American man--except darlings like Sam, here--a wife
is only a convenience, like his motor, and if either one of them breaks down, he takes it to a garage and leaves it and goes off whistling!"

This time her glance at Sam told him what she need not have told him, but she went on with an admirable air of impersonality:

"Whereas the European husband, if I understand it, feels that his wife is a part of him--or at least of his family honor--and he would no more
permit her this fake 'freedom' than he would permit one of his legs to go wandering off cheerfully without the other! He LIKES women! And another
thing. Any real woman is quite willing, no matter how clever she is, to give up her own chances of fame for her husband, PROVIDING he is doing
something she can admire. She can understand sacrificing herself for the kind of civilized aristocracy that Professor Braut speaks of; she can
sacrifice for a great poet or soldier or scholar; but she isn't willing to give up all her own capabilities for the ideal of industrial America--
which is to manufacture more vacuum-cleaners this year than we did last!"

Sam caught her eye. He said, very slowly, "Or more motor cars?"

She laughed. . . . What a jolly, pioneering, affectionate American couple they were!

She said affectionately:

"Yes, or more motors, darling!"

"And you're probably right, at that!" he said.

Every one laughed.

"When people talk about the American wife and the American husband," Fran went on, "they always make the mistake of trying to find out which sex
is 'to blame.' One person will tell you with great impressiveness that the American husband is to blame, because he's so absorbed in his business
and his men friends that he never pays any real attention to his wife. Then the next will explain that it's the wife's fault--'The trouble is
that when the American husband comes home all tired out after the awful rush of our business competition, he naturally wants some attention, some
love from his wife, but she expects him to hustle and change his clothes and take her out to the theater or a party, because she's been bored all
day with not enough to do.' And they're both wrong. There's no BLAME--it isn't the fault of either. I am convinced that the fault belongs to our
American industrial system, with its ideal of forced selling--which isn't a big enough ideal to satisfy any really sensitive woman. No! She
prefers the European culture and tradition of which you spoke, Professor Braut."

"That's kind of hard on me, as one of the promoters of the American industrial system," said Sam.

"Oh, you, you old darling, you're not really an industrialist at heart--you're a researcher."

And again she looked at him so appreciatively that every one was edified at the sight of one happy American couple.



There was, at table and over coffee in the drawing-room, ever so much more conversation. Sam listened to it heartily, while within he was in a
panic of realization that Fran, his one security in life now that work and children and friends were lost, had this evening definitely given the
challenge that she was bored by him, that she desired a European husband, that the interlude with Arnold Israel, who was more European than
Europe, had not been an accident but a symptom.

He watched her turning toward Kurt. He could not ignore her jealousy of Kurt's pretty little friend, the Baroness Volinsky.

The Baroness was a slim, slight girl with beautiful ankles and curly shingled hair. She had nothing much to say. Throughout dinner, Kurt had
turned to her with a hundred intimate approaches--"Do you remember Colonel Gurtz?" and "Vot a first night that was at 'The Patriot.'" Fran had
concentrated on the Baroness Volinsky that chilling inquiring courtesy which is the perfection of hatred; had asked abrupt questions about
Hungary--questions which somehow suggested that Hungary was an inferior land where the women wore wooden shoes--and had not listened to the
answers.

When they chattered their way into the drawing-room and Kurt sat on the arm of the Baroness's chair, Sam noted that within five minutes Fran was
sitting on the other arm of the chair, and that she insisted on speaking French, which Kurt spoke admirably and the Baroness not at all. And
shortly thereafter the Baroness went home, followed by the Biedners and the Brauts, then by the violinist, Von Escher, who said almost
obsequiously to his wife, "Could you possibly find your way home in safety alone? I must go practise with my pianist--tonight is his only free
time."

Minna von Escher, with a snippishness which surprised Sam, remarked to her husband that she had often found her way home alone!

During the agitated German adieux, Sam murmured to Fran, "We better go too, eh?" but she insisted, "Oh, let's stay a little while--best part of
the evening, don't you think?"

He didn't think. He merely looked passive.

Thus there were four together, Sam and Fran, Kurt and Minna von Escher, in that pleasant quiet after the gabble of conversation. In a corner of
the room Kurt was showing Fran an enormous, very old-fashioned album of pictures of his boyhood home--apparently a castle in the Tyrol. Fran was
in a leather chair; Kurt sat on the floor beside her, constantly bolting up to kneel and point out this old servant, that old schoolroom. They
were locked in intimacy, forgetful of every one else.

Sam talked to Minna von Escher. She had a clown-like face, a Brownie-face, with a snub nose and too wide a mouth, but her eyes opened in such
surprised roundness, there was such vitality in her speech, her hands and her ankles were so fine, that she was more attractive than most pretty
women. She lay on the couch, full-length, rather petulant, and Sam sat by her, leaning over with his elbows on his legs, like an old man smoking
on a fence rail.

"Your wife--she praises European husbands!" said Minna. "If she had one! Oh, they can be charming; they kuss d' Hand, they remember your
birthday, they send flowers. But I get so very much tired of having my good Theodor make love to every woman he meets! Just now--of course he had
to go practise with a man pianist, at midnight--well, he is by this time at the apartment of Elsa Emsberg, and if Elsa is a pianist or a man, she
has changed much this past week--and she was MY friend in the first place! Oh, I am a European, but I wish once I had an American husband who
would not sacrifice me to music and lof-affairs!"

She looked at him in a lively, appraising way, and suddenly Sam knew that she considered him an interesting big animal, that he could make love
to her if he liked, and as much as he liked, and he was frightened by it.

He had always been monogamic. Now and then he had been attracted by some other woman, but he had been as shocked as though he were a priest.
Perhaps the fact that his intimate life with Fran had not been very passionate had made him feel that the whole matter of sex stimulation was
something rather shameful, to be avoided as far as possible. Certainly, when he tried to think about it, he escaped from thought with a gruff,
"Oh, a fellow's got to be loyal to his wife, and not go getting mixed up in a lot of complications."

But just now he seemed insufficiently afraid of "getting mixed up." He caught himself noting that Minna had an exquisite body. He thought, "I
ought to give Fran a dose of her own medicine." He looked away from Minna, and growled, "Oh, I guess most husbands in all countries are 'bout
equally selfish; just take different ways of showing it." He looked away, but his look was drawn back to her, and he wanted to take her hand.

"Oh no, you would not be selfish!"

"Sure would!"

"No! I know you better! Big, terrifically strong men like you are always gentle and kind!"

"Hm! I wish you could have met some of the kind, gentle, big fellows from Harvard and Princeton that used to sit on my chest when I played
football!"

"Oh, in sports it is different. But with women--You would be so gentle. But brave. Do you go hunting and camping much, and all those thrilling
things, in your great American wilderness?"

"Well yes, I used to. I did quite a long canoe trip once, in Canada."

"Oh, TELL me about it!"

No one since he had left Zenith had shown so comforting an interest in him. He was not looking away from her now; he was swallowed by her
expanding, flattering eyes as he labored:

"Well, it was nothing especial. Went with a friend of mine. We made about a thousand miles, with sixty-four portages, and the last five days we
lived on tea, without sugar or condensed milk, and fish, and our tent got burnt up, and we slept under the canoe when it rained. Yes, that was
good going. Hm! Like to do it again."

"Why don't you? Why don't you? I can imagine you wonderful in that wilderness."

"Oh, Fran--Mrs. Dodsworth--she doesn't care much for that kind of hiking."

"Hiking? Hiking?"

"Oh, you know." He made a vast circular gesture. "Going. Traveling."

"Oh yes. And she does not like it? Oh, I would!"

"Would you? I'll have to take you camping!"

"Oh, you must!" She seized his sleeve, excitedly shook it. "Don't make a joke! Do it!"

And he was certain that he could--and more certain that between Fran and Kurt, so innocently looking at pictures in their corner, was being woven
a spider-web of affection. He felt helpless, he felt irritated, and that irritation submerged his rising fascination in Minna von Escher. No! He
wasn't going to encourage Fran by giving her an example!

For a moment, while Minna was sputtering an account of her own courage and ingenuity on a North Sea voyage, Sam checked his suspicions. But he
saw Fran blush at some remark of Kurt too low to overhear, saw her glance joined to his, and suddenly Sam was angry.

He grumbled at Minna, "Yes, must have been a mighty nice trip--never done much yachting, myself--say, my Lord, it's getting late!"

He poured across the room: "Fran! Know what time it is? It's almost one!"

"Yes? What of it?"

"Well. . . . Pretty late. We were going out to see Brandenburg tomorrow."

"We don't HAVE to go tomorrow! Good Heavens! We're not on a Cook's tour!"

"Well . . . Kurt has to be on the job."

"Oh no-o!" begged Kurt. "It does not matter. I shall be so unhappy if you run away early!"

"Of course if you INSIST--" said Fran.

She sounded vicious. Kurt looked at them miserably, as though he was wondering what he could do to reconcile them.

"No, no! Just didn't want you to tire yourself out. And here's Mrs. Escher pretty near asleep," Sam crowed jovially. And everybody laughed, and
everybody looked relieved, and everybody said that Yes, wasn't it much more fun to be together, just the Family, after the others had gone.

But Sam had poisoned their moment. They looked self-conscious, and talked about music. Minna von Escher, not at all pleased by Sam's coyness,
made yawning signs of going home, and the party broke up in fifteen minutes, with effusive announcements of what a good time they had had.

And so, in the taxicab, when they had dropped Minna at a residence which was confoundedly out of their way, Sam and Fran again started the
battle.



CHAPTER 24


After Fran had cried, "Good night--such a happy evening--auf Wiedersehen!" to Minna von Escher, she was silent for a minute, and it was a minute
of sixty-thousand seconds, each weighted with fury, like the minute of suspense before a thunder-shower, in a meadow land where the grass turns
poison-green with fear. Sam waited, trying to think of something to think.

She spoke in the manner of a school-teacher who has endured too much but who is still trying to keep her temper:

"Sam, Heaven knows I don't ask much of you in the way of social graces. But I do think I have a right to ask you not to be so selfish that you
spoil not only all my pleasure but that of everybody else! I really don't see why you should always and unfailingly demand that everybody do what
YOU want!"

"I didn't--"

"We were all perfectly happy, sitting there and talking so cheerfully. And I didn't notice that you were being so neglected--certainly that dog-
faced Von Escher woman was flattering you and your pioneer hardihood sickeningly enough, and you simply lapping it up! And it wasn't even very
late--I don't suppose you'll ever learn that Berlin and Paris are not exactly like Zenith, and that sometimes people do manage to keep awake here
after ten o'clock! Count Obersdorf was telling me all about his family, and it was frightfully interesting, and suddenly you feel sleepy and--
bang! The great Samuel Dodsworth is sleepy! The great industrial leader wants to go home! Everything must break up immediately! Nobody else must
be considered! The great I Am has spoken!"

"Fran! I'm not going to lose my temper and let you enjoy a row tonight. . . . At least I hope not!"

"Go on! Lose it! It wouldn't be such a novel and shocking sensation! I'm quite used to it!"

"You are like hell! You've never seen me lose it properly! The last fellow that did--Well, I paid the hospital bills!"

"Oh, the wonderful great hero that can knock people's heads off! That has all the charming virtues of a drunken lumberjack! That--"

"This is a little beside the point, Fran. I wasn't boasting--I was regretting. Listen, darling; now that you've blown off steam, can't you be
reasonable a little while?"

Thus they reached the Adlon, bowed to the doorman as though they were in the best of humor, crossed the marble lobby, a fine, substantial,
dignified couple, went serenely up in the elevator, and fell to it again:

"Fran, we've got to come down to cases. We've been drifting, without any plans, and I wanted to talk plans. . . . Maybe you were right about
tonight. I didn't mean to sound grouchy when I suggested going home, and if I did, I'm sorry."

"It doesn't matter. As a matter of fact, it was probably a good thing. I have a slight headache, from too much cigarette smoke in that tiny
place--I do wish you wouldn't always take your own cigars along and smoke them--it looks so pretentious. But let's not talk plans tonight.
Heavens, if you were in such a mad passion to get away and get to bed, it's a little too much for you to want to stay up half the night talking
about plans, when--"

"But I'm in a mood for it!"

"But I'm not! My dear man, is there any hurry?"

"But we'll put it off, the way we've BEEN putting it off, if we wait till tomorrow."

"Does it matter?"

"It certainly does! By God, I'm going to be a little stubborn myself, for once!"

"For once! Oh, Sam, as if you were ever anything else!"

"All right. Have it your way. If I'm always stubborn, you won't be surprised--"

"AND--PLEASE--DON'T--SHOUT!"

"I am not shouting! Fran, please quit playing the cat-and-mouse with me. Look here. It's getting to be time for us to go home, and I do like Von
Obersdorf, but he's the kind of fellow that's always so surrounded with people that if we stay here we'll find ourselves mixed up with a whole
lot of folks, and we won't get away for weeks."

"What of it? Isn't that what we want? Isn't it worth while really knowing ONE European city? Not that Kurt has anything to do with it. It's
really my cousins, the Biedners."

"But it is Kurt that counts! He's a mighty nice kind chap, but he isn't satisfied unless everybody is having a party all the time, unless he sees
you every day, and especially as he's sort of attracted to you--"

"Sam, are you hinting that he and I--Oh, this is too much! Just because I did like one man besides your high and mighty and sacred self, I can
see that you're going to have the pleasure forever more of throwing it up to me, and of hinting the most outrageous things if I so much as have a
polite talk with a man!"

"FRAN, FOR GOD'S SAKE STOP ACTING!"

"And for God's sake stop cursing! Oh, I don't know what's gotten into you! A few years ago, even a few months ago, you would never have dreamed
of talking to me the way you do. And every day you're getting worse. You have no idea of the kind of language you use--"

"Stop acting! I know perfectly well that so far this Obersdorf fellow and you have been as innocent as babes. But I also know that you could get
too fascinated by him--"

"Nonsense! All we have is the polite interest that any European gentleman and lady have in each other. It's just exactly what I was saying
tonight! The American male is totally unable to think of any woman as an agreeable teatime companion--if I hadn't been too polite and wanted to
protect you, I could have told them a lot more about American wives and husbands! You never think of any woman except as a potential mistress, or
as too unattractive to interest you. Whereas Kurt--'Innocent as babes!' Why, of course we have been, and we'll go on being so!"

"You sure will! And if only for the reason that I'm not going to have another Arnold Israel affair!"

She did not flare back as he expected. She stood fixed, looking at him reproachfully, tears coming. She was suddenly young and helpless and
pitiful, and she spoke slowly:

"Oh, Sam, that wasn't kind of you! I never remember things and throw them up at you, as you do with me. You never understood about Arnold. I
didn't defend myself when you were angry about him. But he was Romance--probably my last--and certainly my first! You were always so good; I've
admired you and respected you; but you've always been so sound, so cautious, whereas with Arnold there was danger and excitement and madness and-
-Just for once in a whole lifetime, I let myself risk danger! And I found I had a talent for it, too! And then, for you, I gave it up; I
obediently settled down to plodding around from hotel to hotel, wherever you wanted to go. Arnold kept writing me, and I scarcely ever answered
him, and now, of course, I've lost him for ever--for your sake! And then you insult me about him! Oh, Sam, that WASN'T generous!"

She cried a little, sitting twisted in a big chair, her cheek against the back of it.

Sam felt that there was something wrong, something self-dramatizing, about her version, but his sulkiness at being beguiled was less than his
fondness of her. He stroked her hair; he said, more tenderly and intimately than for a long while:

"I was beastly. Forgive me. And besides, of course I know your friendship for Kurt is something quite different." He heard an inner, testy voice:
"It isn't, and you know it, fool!" But he went on urgently, drawing a small gilt chair, ridiculous beneath his bulk, to her side, and holding her
hand as he talked:

"Fran, I want to go home and get to work. I'm naturally an active sort of fellow. I can't stand this loafing any more. And I don't want to
manufacture cars. Maybe I half agree with you in what you said about industrialized America, tonight. What I want to do--Oh, I suppose there'd be
a lot of industrialization to it; certainly have to use modern methods in production and sales and advertising if we're going to meet
competition. But there would be a kind of individual achievement, I'd hope, and a lasting--This is something I've been figuring on for nine-ten
months now, but I haven't said anything about it because I wanted to be sure. And for once, it would be something you could take part in--"

She sat up with a bounce, tears dried, and demanded, "Oh, SAY it! Don't make a speech! Forgive me, darling, for being rude, but you DO take such
a time--"

"Well, I want to have this clear, especially to myself. I never did pretend to be especially quick on the trigger!"

"As a matter of fact, you do think very quickly, once you have your facts, but you have a superstition--I fancy it started back in college, when
you had to play up to Silent Hero role. You have some kind of a childish idea--oh, I know you so MUCH better than you do yourself!--you have an
idea that it's somehow ridiculous for so big and solid a man as you are to speak quickly, and you've always suffered from it--"

"We're getting away from the point. Let me finish. As I say, this is a project that you could do as much with, and have as much fun with, as I
could, and maybe more. Here's the idea:"

And, rather lumberingly, much interrupted, he outlined his notion of a better Sans Souci Gardens.

He had scarcely finished when she volleyed, "Oh, it's too utterly impossible!"

"Why?"

"You haven't the taste for that sort of thing--domestic architecture and decoration and so on. Why, Sam, I bet you can't tell me what the color
of the last curtains we had in the drawing-room at home was!"

"They were--well, they were a kind--Now let's see. They were pale red."

"They were a sort of beige, with so little red in it that it didn't matter. Dear, I do see the fun of a new venture like that, but for YOU--"

"Well, I personally attended to picking out the body colors and upholstery of the Revelation, the last five years, and I think it's generally
admitted that they were the swellest--"

"You didn't, really. You depended on that awful lizzie, Willy Dutberry, that you had in the designing shop."

"Well, anyway, I picked out Willy, didn't I? And I had sense enough to follow his steer, didn't I?--even if he did wear side-whiskers and a pink
tie! And for my development, I'll pick out--Hell, Fran, I do know how to pick men! I don't pretend to know everything, even about autos. I don't
need to. But I can--"

"And another thing, Sam. I do love you for wanting to produce something individual and lasting. But an American garden suburb--Phooey! Nasty,
jammed-together huddle of World's Fair exhibition buildings, with pretentious street names--"

"Then make one that isn't pretentious or jammed! People have to live somewhere! And I'd depend on you a lot for suggestions about good taste and
all that--"

"It's awfully flattering of you, my dear, but I certainly do not intend--or certainly not till I'm a lot older--I don't intend to give all my
days and nights to being sweet to a lot of horrible parvenus who want Touraine chateaux with Frigidaire furnishings and all at mail-order
prices!"



They argued for an hour. Fran had recovered from her Duse role, and was alternately airy and pityingly maternal. Sam felt that he had somehow not
made clear his plan, but she blocked his each new effort at being articulate, and they went to bed at three with nothing clear except that, while
she might condescend to go home with him in a vague four or five or six months, she was not going to help him "build stone castles of cement, and
brick manor houses of linoleum," and that she was refraining entirely on account of her artistic ethics.

Remumbling the whole talk again as he lay awake, Sam could not get quite straight how it had happened that he had again failed to lure her home.

"And she says I'm a bully. Well, as a bully, I class about 1/2 h.p., 2 m.p.h.," he sighed, as he fell asleep.

He dreamed that Fran had fallen from a cliff and lay dead below him, and that Minna von Escher had come to smirk temptingly at him. He awoke to
revile himself, then to rejoice that it wasn't so. In the dawn, he sat up in bed to look at Fran, and she was so childish, even her little nose
hidden under the sheets, that he could think of no slogan of deliverance from her power.



Dining with Kurt--at Hiller's, Borchardt's, Peltzer's, at the Bristol and Kaiserhof, at the simpler Siechen's and Pschorrbrau. Dining at the
Winter Garten, on the terrace, watching the vaudeville performance. Dining at outdoor places round about the Tiergarten, as the weather grew
warmer and the beer more refreshing. A motor flight to the country house of a friend of Kurt, where all one glorious Sunday afternoon they loafed
in the garden or bathed in the Havel.

But the point was that they were always with Kurt.

And Kurt, though he liked Sam, admired him, yet had conceived that Sam and Fran, like so many other American couples he had seen squabbling into
and out of the Internation Tourist Agency, were on the point of breaking. And to him, the Viennese, accustomed to tempestuous strays from the
bitter mountains and gray plains to Eastward and the North, this cool eager American woman was more exotic, more stimulating, than any Russian or
Croatian or Zingara. . . . And she had a useful income of her own. . . . And there was, in all honor, no reason why he should not be there when
the break-up came, nor why Fran should not have the privilege of buttressing the ancient house of Obersdorf.

At least, so Sam guessed at Kurt's opinion, and he could not protest that the chart was altogether in error.



It was a slow task for Sam to admit that he, with the training of an executive and the body of a coal-heaver, could not bully or coax his slim
wife into reasonableness when her romanticizing ran away with her and she disclosed a belief that she was so superior that he ought to accompany
her wherever she cared to stroll, or to stand acquiescent while she beamed at Kurt.

It was impossible, but it was so.

Sam tried all the recognized methods of bullying her. Their naked and wretched squabble after Kurt's party was repeated. He insisted that she was
"coming home to America and coming right now!" But what was he to do when she reminded him that she had an income, and when she asserted (she
really believed it) that she could always earn her own living?

What, still less, could he do when, after a night when he had lain awake ribbing up righteous anger, they awakened to a sparkling, growing day,
and they walked along the Canal, lunched well, drove to the Wannsee and back, and watched sunset over the Tiergarten; when she stopped, twitched
his sleeve, and said gravely, "Oh, Sam darling, will you let me thank you for all the lovely places you've taken me? I'm so heedless and silly
that often I don't speak of it, but all the while, inside of me, dear--"

Her eyes were wet.

"--I'm terribly grateful. Venice! Rome! Paris! And this quiet sunset. Thank you, dear. . . . And thank you for not being a Tartar husband--for
understanding that I can be excited and friendly with nice little people like Kurt without being a hussy!"

Just what was he to do? Except perhaps to mutter, "Have I ever remembered to say I adore you?"

Nor could he turn on Kurt von Obersdorf, since Kurt was--after much doubting Sam believed it--quite as fond of him as of Fran; since Kurt seemed
eager to bring them together again, whatever it might cost himself in a chance at Fran's favors and fortune.

With the Dodsworths' isolation in Berlin, Kurt's ability to fall headlong in friendship, and Fran's liking for the glories of a Count, however
dimmed, they three became a family, and as one of the family Kurt sought to soothe them. He was curiously impartial; with all his emotionalism he
was a fair umpire. When Fran snapped at her husband for his inability to learn any German beyond "Zweimal dunkles," Kurt begged, "Oh, do not
speak so crossly--that is not nize," and when Sam growled that he'd be damned if he'd sit till two A.M. watching her dance, Kurt would represent,
"But you ought to be happy to see her so happy! Forgive me! But she is so lovely when she is happy! And she is fragile. She is easily broken by
things and moods that we do not mind."

Kurt said--he really seemed to mean--that he too was lonely in Berlin, and though he very much did not want to intrude, he would be glad if he
might play about with the Dodsworths every day that they remained. . . . And whatever his comparative poverty might be, he always paid his share
of the bills.

"Be so much easier too if he weren't so damn' fair and square!" Sam sighed.

He had no proof, no proof whatever, that there was between Kurt and Fran anything more than this family affection.

Once or twice, as when the Berlin agent for the Revelation car looked Sam up and took him to a luncheon of the American Club, Kurt and Fran
slipped away by themselves. He spent a conversational evening in the Adlon Bar while they went learnedly to the opera. After these outings, Fran
looked rosy and content.

In London, thanks to the attentions of Mr. A. B. Hurd, Sam had retained something of a position as an industrialist. Since then, progressively,
he had become merely the Husband of the Charming Mrs. Dodsworth. He saw it, though he could not see precisely how it had happened. In Berlin, he
felt that no one considered him as anything save her attendant--even after the unfortunate incident of Herr Dr. Johann Josef Blumenbach.

Herr Blumenbach's card was brought up to Sam as he was about to change for dinner. "Don't know who he is. Still, name does sound kind of
familiar. Probably some friend of HERS," Sam decided, and grumbled to the page, "Let him come up."

When he informed Fran, who was sewing a snap on an evening frock in her bedroom, she protested that she knew no Blumenbachs. She followed him to
their sitting-room, and sniffed. A square, bullet-headed, bristle-headed, swollen-nosed man was Herr Dr. Johann Josef Blumenbach, with ancient
and absurd spats.

"Excuse me that I call on you, Herr Dodtswort'," he sputtered, "and please to excuse my English, it is I guess owful bad English that I speak.
But I have some liddle interest in a motor factory and from the motor magazines, besides my cousin lives in America, in St. Louis, I know moch
about your development of the streamline in owtomobeelz. I vould be very pleast if Frau Dodtswort' and you would care to look over our factory."

Very suavely Fran eliminated Herr Blumenbach with, "That's very kind of you, Herr Uh, but we're leaving in just a couple of days, and I'm afraid
we're going to be FRIGHTFULLY busy. You will excuse us, I'm sure."

He looked at her with a most active dislike; he snorted, "Oh, t'ank you very moch," and disappeared with quite ludicrous haste.

"His nerve! Probably hoped to get money out of you for some horrible gamble," she said placidly as Sam trailed her back to the significant
business of sewing on the snap. "HORRID man! And YOU'D have taken an hour to get rid of him!"

When Kurt inevitably came in to pick them up for dinner, Sam inquired, "Ever hear of a man named Blumenback, Johann Blumenback or some such a
name--something to do with motors?"

"But of course!" said Kurt.

"Horrid man," offered Fran.

"Oh no-o-o! He iss a very fine man. Very public spirited. And he is one of the two or three big men in the motor industry in Germany. He controls
the Mars company--I suppose the Mars is the finest motor in Europe--"

"Of course! That's where I'd heard the name," muttered Sam.

"--and I wish you could meet him. He would give you everything inside on motor industry here. But I have not the honor to know him. I have just
seen him in a Gesellschaft."

"We must hurry!" said Fran.

And Sam said nothing at all.

He thought, many times, that if he telephoned to Herr Dr. Blumenbach, he might be accepted and entertained in Berlin as the Samuel Dodsworth he
once had been--might thus again become that Samuel Dodsworth.

And he did nothing at all.



They had expeditions with the Baroness Volinsky and Minna von Escher, until Kurt, wounded to his little heart, as he could so often and so
piteously be wounded, was convinced that no amount of advertising the merits of the pretty little baroness would make Fran like her. As to why
Sam and Minna did not get along, he never understood, so he looked hurt and gave it up.

To Sam, Frau von Escher was a reminder that there were women who did not find him clumsy and cold, and he wanted to escape from that reminder. He
could well enough picture falling into the entertaining distress of passion. He could even question whether it wasn't merely emotional indolence
and fear of getting "mixed up," not morality, which had kept him "pure." Wasn't it because he did want to kiss Minna's wide derisive mouth that
he was chilly to her, and contradicted everything she said . . . and gave Fran a chance to point out that he WAS rude and that it had been only
her influence which had kept him amiable all these years?

"Hell!" said Sam Dodsworth wearily, and for all his searching he never found a more competent way of expressing it.

So he groped through the fog, and there was no path to be found. In the distance was the sound of menacing waters, and always he stumbled over
unseen roots in a trance less real than any dream.



CHAPTER 25


It seemed a singularly undistinguished morning. Sam looked forward only to a vague dinner with Kurt and a friend from Vienna, and as Kurt had
said nothing more ecstatic about his friend than that he was "soch a good fellow and he speaks seven languages and is so fonny," Sam knew that
the fellow couldn't be up to much. For the afternoon they planned to see the exhibit of Kolbe's sculptures at Cassirer's and the French
impressionists at the Gallerie Tannhauser, and Sam hoped (not very optimistically) to lure Fran out to Charlottenburg to inspect factories and
tenements for laborers. . . . She liked to discuss what she called the Lower Classes with every one save members of the Lower Classes.

He lolled in the sitting-room of their suite, rather slovenly in dressing-gown and ancient slippers, which Fran was always going to replace by
new elegance and never did. When he had finished reading the Paris American papers and had exclaimed over the fact that Mr. T. Q. Obelisk of
Zenith had just landed in Europe and was going to squander an entire three weeks in Paris, he had nothing more to do. He thought of answering
Henry Hazzard's last letter. But--oh, thunder, there was no news--He thought of having a drink, and answered that it was much too early in the
day. He thought of going for a walk but--oh, he'd walked all over the inner city.

He mouched. He prowled through the sitting-room, turning over tourist agency folders about Java--the North Cape--Rio de Janeiro.

He peeped into the bedroom. Fran, in nightgown and fluffy pink knitted bed jacket, was still abed, but over her chocolate she was furiously
trying to read the Vossische Zeitung and the Tageblatt with the aid of a dictionary, imagination, and discreet skipping. He looked admiringly at
her display of scholarship, he said that it was going to be a swell day, and returned to the sitting-room to stare out at the Pariser Platz and
wish he were home.

At a knock, he said "Come IN!" indifferently. It would be the room-waiter, to clear away.

It was a boy with a cable.

For a time Sam put off opening it. It pleased him to think that even in his insignificance here in Berlin, he was the sort of man who received
cables. Then he read:


"congratulate us birth nine pound son stop emily splendid shape cheers stop your first grandchild harry mckee."


Sam stood glorying. He was not finished, after all--something of him had been carried on with this new life! And Emily would be so happy! How he
loved her! And NOW, by golly, Fran would want to go home! They'd catch the next steamer and see the baby, Emily, Harry, Brent, Tub, Henry
Hazzard--In maybe two weeks--

He paraded into the bedroom, trying to play-act, trying to sound unemotional as he remarked, "Um, uh, Fran--lil cable from Zenith."

"Yes?" sharply. "Anything wrong?"

"Well--Fran!" He went to kiss her; he ignored her slight impatience. "We're granddaddy and grandmammy! And the devils never let us know youngster
was coming--prob'ly spare us worry. Emily has a son! Nine pounds!"

"And how--"

"She's fine, apparently. So Harry wires." In her quick, happy look he felt more secure and married and real than for weeks. "My God, I wish they
had the transatlantic 'phone working from here, way they have from London now. We'd 'phone 'em, if it cost a hundred a minute. Wouldn't that be
great, to hear Emily's voice! Tell you what I am going to do! I'll 'phone Kurt Obersdorf and tell him about our grandson. I've got to holler--"

Her face tightened. "Wait!"

"What's the idea?"

"I'm delighted. Of course. Dear Emily! She'll be so happy. But, Sam, don't you realize that Kurt--oh, I don't mean Kurt individually, of course;
I mean all our friends in Europe--They think of me as young. Young! And I am, oh, I AM! And if they know I'm a grandmother--God! A grandmother!
Oh, Sam, can't you SEE? It's horrible! It's the end, for me! Oh, please, please, please try to understand! Think! I was so young when I married.
It isn't FAIR for me to be a grandmother now, at under forty." With swiftness he calculated that Fran was now forty-three. "A grandmother! Lace
caps and knitting and rheumatism! Oh, please try to understand! It isn't that I'm not utterly happy for Emily's sake, but--I have my own life,
too! You mustn't tell Kurt! Ever!"

He knew then, well enough.

He was too hard hit to dare be angry. "Yes, I see how you mean. Yes, I--Well, I'll go cable to Emily and Harry."



It was that evening, before they went out to dinner with Kurt, that he noticed her new habit of perfuming the back of her right hand, and
reflected, "I wonder if it has anything to do with his kissing her hand? Wonder? You don't wonder; you know!"

He saw further that she faintly perfumed the inside of her arm to the elbow, and he was a little sickened as he stalked out to the sitting-room
and tried to divert himself by reading the list of Circular Tours in Great Britain and France in the "European Travel Guide" of the American
Express Company, while waiting for her to finish dressing. It didn't altogether absorb him. He looked about the room. There were roses--sent by
Kurt. There was Feuchtwanger's "Jud Suss"--sent by Kurt.

Then there was Kurt himself, knocking, coming in gaily, crying, "Is that wife of ours late again? Sam, I have brought you a box of real Havana
cigars smuggled through without duty! Oh, my roses came! I am glad. Sam, haf you any idea how thankful a lonely poor man--and to a Wiener like
me, Berlin is just as foreign as it is to you!--so thankful to have Fran and you tolerate me while you are here! You are so good! . . . Fran! Are
you not dressed? You are keeping your poor children waiting! If I were Sam, I would beat you! And my friend probably waiting in the lobby."

"Coming, Kurt!" she sang, lark-like.

And Kurt was kissing the back of her hand. And Sam Dodsworth said nothing at all.



But it was down in the bar, where they went to have cocktails and to wait for Kurt's friend, that the new and almost honestly analytic Sam
Dodsworth caught himself in a situation more shameful and enfeebling than anything that had happened in their apartment. An American motor
salesman, whom Sam had met at the American Club luncheon, stopped at their table to nod his greetings, and Sam caught himself saying, a little
proudly, "Mr. Ashley, I don't think you've met my wife. And this is the Count Obersdorf."

"Mighty pleased to meet you, Count," said the motor man, after kissing Fran's hand in what he considered a European manner.

Sam sharply cross-examined himself. "Look here, Samba. Were you flattered to be able to introduce a Count? This tourist agency clerk! How long
will it be before you become the kind of rotten soak that sits around boasting that his wife has a count for a lover? No! I'm not that bad, not
yet. But I guess my mind is kind of sick, now. What the devil was it that hit me? I don't understand. Emily, my darling, with a son! Doesn't Fran
want--"

Coolly, quite prosaically, he interrupted Kurt to demand of Fran, "Say, uh, remember I told you about that young lady--that cousin of mine--
that's just had a baby? Wouldn't you like to skip back to America and see her?"

"Oh, I'd love to. But I don't suppose we'll see her till next autumn," said Fran placidly.

"Here comes my friend. SOCH a lovely fellow," said Kurt.



The second message from Zenith, from home, came in a letter which was handed to Sam at the desk, three evenings later, as they were going out to
dinner with Kurt.

"From old Tub!" he chuckled, and tucked it into his pocket. When they were at table he suggested, "Mind if I glance at my letter?"

Tub wrote, in schoolboyish script:


How are you and how's all the lovely femmes in Europe? Well, you're not going to get away with hogging them much longer. Matey and I have finally
decided about time we ran over and had a look at the old country and get a decent drink. She's a grand wife and likes her likker. We sail on May
tenth, on the Olympic, arrive London probably 16th, and Paris the 21st--stay Savoy London and Continental Paris. In Paris about a week, then
Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, south France, and sail from Cherbourg again on June 20th. Some fast trip, eh, but I bet we don't miss much,
your last post card, and a hell of a tightwad you are about writing say you're going to Germany but don't see what you find there, can only get
beer there and it's the bubbles that cure all your trouble that I want to taste again, you remember old song, champagne.

Now if you're too busy to remember old friends all right, but would be awfully glad if you could manage meet us London or Paris, or if along
route afterwards send me schedule c/o Equitable Trust, 23 rue de la Paix.

Don't take any wooden money.

Sincerely, your friend,

THOS. J. PEARSON.


The letter had followed Sam from Paris to Rome to Berlin; Tub was already in London and would be in Paris in three days.

It was one of the few holograph letters Sam had received from Tub. Usually his laconic messages were dictated, typed on banking-house paper as
stiff and luxuriously engraved as a bond. In it Sam felt an unfamiliar urgency; Tub was prepared to be angry, to consider himself deliberately
slighted, if the Dodsworths did not appear in Paris to greet him and his jolly wife Matilde, otherwise Matey.

He interrupted Kurt--("Damn it! Seems at though, these days, I always have to interrupt that fellow in order to be able to speak to my own
wife!") He crowed, "Say, who d'you think's in London and going to Paris? Tub and Matey!"

"Oh, really?" she said politely. She showed considerably more warmth in explaining to Kurt, "Tub is an old friend of Sam--quite a prosperous
banker. If they come to Berlin, they'd be awfully happy to meet you. Oh! You said one day you wished you could get into a bank in America. Tub--
Mr. Pearson his name is--might be able--"

"But we'll see him in Paris," Sam interrupted again. "Not coming to Berlin. And we ought to skip right down and be there to welcome 'em. Remember
they've never been abroad before. I'll wire him in London tonight--might even see if I can get him on the 'phone--and we can probably get
reservations for the Paris train for tomorrow evening."

Surely when Fran heard good old Matey gossip of their friends, when she scented Zenith again--The miracle had happened!

"But, Sam dear," Fran protested, "I don't see any reason under Heaven why we SHOULD go down! And you complaining of how tired you were of Paris
when we left it! I know how fond you are of your friends, but I don't see why you should let them use you!"

"But don't you want to see Tub and Matey?"

"Don't be silly! Of course, I'd be very glad to see them. But to trot all the way to Paris--"

"But don't you WANT--I can't imagine your not wanting--"

"Well, if you must know, I think your good friend Mr. Tub Pearson is a little heavy in the hand. He always works so hard at being humorous. And
you yourself have admitted that Matey is dreadfully uninteresting. And fat! Good Heavens, I've had them for twenty years! No, you can do what
you'd like, but I'm not going."

"But I wouldn't be much good to 'em as a guide. I can't speak French."

"Exactly! Then why go? They can get along as every one else does."

"But you could make it so much pleasanter for them--"

"It's all very well to be friendly and that sort of thing, but I'm not going to travel fifteen hours in a dirty train for the pleasure of acting
as an unpaid Cook's guide to Mr. and Mrs. Tub Pearson!"

"Well, all right. Then I'll go by myself."

"As you wish!"

She turned briskly to Kurt, and with excessive sweetness discoursed on the state of the theater in Central Europe. Kurt looked at Sam, troubled,
wishing to say something soothing. Sam was very quiet all that evening.



It was she who opened the engagement when they were alone, at the hotel.

"I'm sorry about Tub, and I'll go down there--a beastly journey!--if you absolutely insist--"

"I never insist on anything."

"--but I do think it's too ridiculous to be expected to be a guide--and of course your beloved Tub will want to go to the most obvious and stupid
and Americanized places in Paris--"

"No, I've decided you'd better not come. You're probably right. Tub will want to get drunk on Montmartre."

"For which charming occupation, my dear Samuel, you'll be a much better collaborator than I, I'm afraid!"

"Look here, Fran: I wonder if you have any idea how dangerous it might be for you, one of these days, if you go on being so airy and insulting
with me? I'd stood--"

"'S the truth!"

"--a good deal. I can understand your not thinking Tub is any Endicott Everett Atkins, but how you can fail to enjoy giving a good time to a
neighbor that we've known as long and as closely as we have Tub--Why you don't, just for once, forget what YOU'RE going to get out of it and
think what you could GIVE--"

"Oh, put in the Beatitudes, too!"

"--is simply beyond me! I used to think you were loyal!"

"I am! The way I've refused to stand any one ever criticizing you--"

"Will you listen! Don't be so damned PERFECT, just for once! I used to think you were loyal, but between this business about Tub, and your lack
of interest in Emily's boy--"

"Now I've had enough! You've quite sufficiently indicated that I'm an inhuman monster! Why, after I heard the news about Emily, I cried half the
night, wanting to see her and the baby. But--Oh, if I could only make you understand!" She had thrown off her flippancy and was naked and
defenseless in her seriousness. "I do rejoice that she has a child. I do love her. But--oh, I've tried to use my brains, such as they are, which
I admit isn't very much, except that I do have common sense. I've tried not to be sentimental, and ruin myself, yes, and you, without doing Emily
or anybody else any good! What good would it do if I were there? Could I help her? I could not! I'd just be in the way. Heavens, any trained
nurse would be of more value than a dozen me's, and she's surrounded with only too much love and solicitude. I'd be just another burden, at a
time when she has plenty. On the other hand, as it would affect me--

"When the world hears the word 'grandmother,' it pictures an old woman, a withered old woman, who's absolutely hors de combat. I'm not that and
I'm not going to be, for another twenty years. And YET, most people are so conventional-minded that even if they know me, see me, dance with me,
once they hear I'm a grandmother that label influences them more than their own senses, and they put me on the side-lines immediately. I won't
be! And yet I love Emily and--

"Let me tell you, young man, when there WAS something I could do for her, and for Brent, I did it! I'm not for one second going to stand any
hints from you that I'm not a good mother--and loyal! For twenty years, or anyway till Brent went off to college, there wasn't one thing those
children wore that I didn't buy. There wasn't a thing they ate that I didn't order. You--oh yes, you came grandly home from the office and
permitted Em to ride on your shoulders and thought what a wonderful parent you were, but who'd taken her to the dentist that day? I had! Who'd
planned her party and written the invitations? I had! Who'd gotten down on her knees and scrubbed Em's floor when the maids had the 'flu and the
nurse was away junketing? I did! I've done my work, I've earned the right to play, and I'm not going to be robbed of it just because you're so
slow and unimaginative that you've lost the power of enjoyment and can't conceive any occupation beyond selling motors and playing golf!"

"Yes. I guess--I guess maybe there's a good deal to what you say," he sighed. "Well, it works out all right. I'll trot off and welcome Tub and
then come back."

"Yes, and you'll probably enjoy it more if I'm not there. Men ought to get off by themselves now and then, away from the dratted women. Take my
advice and get rid of Matey as much as you can--get her interested in buying a lot of clothes and you and Tub knock around together. You'll
probably have a wonderful time. You do see now that I wasn't merely being beastly and unselfish, don't you?"

And she kissed him, fleetingly, and was cheerfully off to bed.

Even of such kisses there had not been over many, since the affair of Arnold Israel. The change in their intimacy was never admitted, but it was
definite. It was not that Fran was less attractive to him; indeed more than ever he valued her sleek smoothness; but she had become to him a nun,
taboo, and any passion toward her was forbidden. She seemed relieved by it; and they had drifted into a melancholy brother and sister
relationship which left him irritable and hopeless.

They said nothing, neither then nor next day, of the tact that when Sam went to Paris, Fran and Kurt von Obersdorf would be left together. And
these two, Fran and Kurt, very cheery and affectionate, saw him off on the evening train for Paris, and Kurt brought him as bon voyage presents a
package of American cigarettes, a cactus plant, and a copy of the Nation, under the misconception that it was one of the most conservative of
American magazines and especially suitable to the prejudices of a millionaire manufacturer.



Sam had to share his sleeping compartment with a small meek German who insisted, with apologetic gestures, on taking the undesirable upper berth,
to which Sam was billeted. So when the German wanted to keep on the night-light, Sam could not object, and he lay in his berth staring up into a
narrow vault made gloomier by that sepulchral blue glimmer which took away the oblivion of darkness and revealed the messy crowdedness of the
compartment: the horribly life-like trousers swaying against the wall, the valises wedged under the little folding table by the window, the
litter of newspapers and cigarette butts. The train was loud with fury; it carried him on powerless; life carried him on powerless. Without Fran,
he felt small, callow, defenseless. Why was he venturing to Paris, alone? He knew no French, really; he knew little of anything in Europe. He was
marooned.

She had let him go off so casually. Was he going to lose her, to whom he had turned with every triumph and every worry these twenty-four years;
whose hand had always been there, to let him warm and protect it, that he might himself be warmed and protected?

Or already lost her?

He brooded, a lumpy blanketed mound in the mean blue ghost-light.

What could he DO?

The train seemed to be running with such abnormal speed. Surely even the Twentieth Century had never raced like this. Anything wrong?

It would be nice if it were Fran in the upper berth; if her hand were drooping over the edge, so that he could see it, perhaps touch it by
pretended accident--

Not that she'd be in the upper, though, if they were together!



When he awoke at three, his first loneliness for her had passed, and he worked up a good deal of angry protest.

This "adventurous new life" they'd been going to find--Rats! Might be for her, but he himself had never been so bored. All came of trying to suit
himself to her whims. And then lose her, after all--


What would Kurt and she be doing while he was away?

And this business of her having been such a devoted mother! Ever been a time when the children hadn't had a nurse or a governess, with plenty of
maids? If she ever did "get down on her knees and scrub a floor" it'd never happened more than once.

Oh, she'd meant it; she really did believe she'd been a sacrificing mother. Chief trouble with her. Never could see herself as she was. Never!

Yes, he'd have to rebel against her--or against his worship of her. Not been a go, his trying to be happy in her way. Make a life for HIMSELF. Be
pretty darn' lonely for a while. Sure. But not impossible to make a new life--

There were women, to say nothing of men friends--

Suddenly he was taut with desire for Minna von Escher. He felt her lips; he saw her too clearly.

Well, there were gorgeous girls in Paris--Hang it, he was no washed-out Sir Galahad, like he'd read about in Tennyson! He'd been patient and
sacrificing. Lot of good it'd done him! Why should Fran have all the love? He'd go out--

Then Fran's face, hovering in the wan blue dusk, a hurt, reproving face, very pale, very pure. He could not wound her, even by thought. And so he
tossed, helpless in the rushing train, turning from the desire to serve Fran to the desire for Minna's warm arms, and back ever to Fran . . . and
back ever to Minna.



He breakfasted well in the restaurant carriage, and if he missed Fran, it was a relief to have a man's proper ration of bacon and eggs without
having her chronic complaint that real Europeans don't take horrid heavy breakfasts. When he had lighted a cigar, Sam felt a faint exciting
flavor in traveling alone, in going where he would.

He heard an American woman, at breakfast, say to her companion, "But the play I really liked was 'They Knew What They Wanted.'"

He heard no more. He pondered, "That's been the trouble with me, my entire life. It isn't simply that I've never got what I wanted. I've never
known what I wanted. There are women who are better sports than Fran. Not so selfish. More peace. If I find them--

"Be funny if now I really were starting that 'adventure in new life' that we've talked so much rot about! Yes, I have known what I wanted--Fran!
But probably as a kid wants the moon. (That's what she's like too--the moon on a still November night!) And if I can't have her--well, I hope I
have the sense to find something else, and to take it. . . . But I won't!"



CHAPTER 26


He was going to surprise Tub and Matey at the station. He had gone to the Continental Hotel, at which Tub had reservations. From Berlin, he had
merely wired Tub in London, "Be in Paris day or two after you arrive delighted see you"; from Paris he had telephoned to Mr. A. B. Hurd, of
Revelation Motors in London, asking him to snoop about and find out from the Savoy porter what train Tub was taking.

Sam waited in the Gare du Nord, excited but pleasantly superior. HE was no American tourist, embarrassed by the voluble Parisians! He knew 'em!
He could say to a porter, "Apportez le bagage de Monsieur a un taxicab" just as well as old Berlitz--almost as well as Fran. He swung his stick,
strolled along the platform, and nodded to the gathering porters, feeling much as he had on the evening after the last game of the football
season. When the lean swift French locomotive flashed in, hurling its smoke up to join the ghosts of smoke-palls that lurked under the vast roof
of the train shed, he chuckled aloud.

"Old Tub! And Matey! First time in Paris!"

He looked over the heads of the crowd and saw Tub handing his bags out of the car window to a porter, saw him and the plump Matey hustle out of
the car, saw him, with the blank worried nervousness of a man who doesn't expect to be met and who feels that the labors of travel are too much
for him, wave his arms in the effort of explaining in Zenith French--dealcoholized French, French Hag--where he wanted to go.

Swift, looming, Sam thrust through the crowd toward the Pearsons. He saw that Tub himself was carrying a small suitcase--probably with Matey's
famous and atrocious jewelry. He swooped on Tub, grasped his shoulder, and snarled (with one of the exceedingly few impersonations in his
unhistrionic life), "Here, you, fella! Not allowed carry y' own baggage!"

Tub looked up with all the rage of an honest American who has been enfeebled by rough seas, doubted by customs officials, overcharged by waiters,
overinformed by guides, misunderstood by French conductors; who has suddenly by thunder had enough and who is going to expose and explode the
entire continent of Europe. He looked up, he looked bewildered, and then he said slowly, "Well, you damned old horse-thief! Well, you big stiff!"

They banged each other's shoulders, Sam kissed the suddenly beaming Matey, and they went down the platform together, Sam with one arm about Tub's
shoulder and one about Matey's. He said sharply to the porter, "Un taxi, s'il vous plait"--just as the porter was waving to a taxi on his own--
and Tub clamored, "Well, I'm a son of a gun! Say, you've certainly learned to parley-vous like a native, Sambo!"



They asked after Fran.

It hurt him that they seemed content to miss her, willing to believe that she "had a touch of 'flu and had to lie low a couple weeks, so she
couldn't come down to welcome you." But he resented it only for a moment. There were so many exciting places to show Tub! It was delightful to
have the Tub who had always been cleverer and more fashionable than he now regarding him as a sophisticated European and turning to him, admiring
his dash and flavor.

And it was pleasant to be Tubbish and foolish and noisy without Fran's supercilious inspection.

Matey Pearson was a good soul. She was fat and pleasant. As a girl she had been the gayest and maddest of her set in Zenith; the fastest skater,
the most ecstatic dancer, the most reckless flirt. Now she had three children--one was Brent's classmate in Yale--and she cultivated the
Episcopal Church, a rare shrewd game of poker, and the choicest dahlias in Zenith. Fran said that she was vulgar. She said that Fran was lovely.

At the hotel she kissed Sam again, and cried, "Say, my heavens but it's nice to see a human being that's HUMAN again! Now you boys get to thunder
out of here and let me unpack, and you go off and get decently drunk, but do try to be sober enough for dinner, which gives you two hours, if we
dine at eight, and enough time too, sez I. Get out of here! I love you both. With reservations!"

To be alone with Tub Pearson, on Tub's first afternoon on the continent of Europe!

They had leapt over the barriers that had been erected between them since college--different vocations, rivalry as to the splendor of their
several children, rivalry as to social honors, and this last flagrancy of Sam in living abroad while Tub stayed true at home. They were today the
friends who had shared dress-shirts and speculations in Senior year.

From time to time they looked at each other and muttered, "Awful' good to be here with you, you old devil!"

Sam did not see that Tub was completely gray, that he was podgy, that round his eyes were the lines of a banker who day after day sharply refuses
loans to desperate men. He saw the lively Tub whom he had protected in fights with muckers and whom he had admired for his wit; and while he held
to his temporary superiority as the traveled man and tutored gourmet, he anxiously showed Tub all his little treasures.

He took Tub to the New York Bar, and impressed Tub as an habitue by casually asking whether anybody had heard from Ross Ireland. He took Tub to
Luigi's, introduced him to Luigi, and recommended the scrambled eggs. He took Tub to the Chatham Bar; he was so fortunate as to find Colonel
Kelly, the famous soldier of fortune; and he felt expansive and philanthropic; he felt, after this third highball, as though his European agonies
really had been worth while, when he observed Tub's respectful attention to Colonel Kelly.

He felt that Tub was the finest and most lovable man living; that he was beyond belief lucky to have such a friend; and they returned to the
Continental in a high state of philanthropy and Yalensianism.

Matey looked them over and sighed, "Well, you aren't much drunker than I thought you'd be, and now you better go in and wash your little faces in
the bathroom and have a coupla Bromo Seltzers--believe me, Sam, traveling with THAT man, I never fail to have some real genuine American Bromo
along--and then if you can both still walk, we'll go out and have the handsomest dinner in Paree."



He took them to Voisin's, but when they were seated Tub looked disappointed.

"Not such a lively place," he said.

"No, I know it isn't, but it's a famous old restaurant, and perhaps the best food and wine in town. What kind of a place would you like? Find it
for you tomorrow."

"Well, I don't know. I don't know exactly what I did think a Paris restaurant would be like but--Oh, I thought there'd be a lot of gilt, and
marble pillars, and a good orchestra, and lots of dancing, and a million pretty girls, regular knock-outs, and not so slow either. I better watch
meself, or I'll be getting Matey jealous."

"Hm," said Matey. "Tub has a good, conscientious, hardworking ambition to be a devil with the ladies--our fat little Don Juan!--but the trouble
is they don't fall for him."

"That's all right now! I'm not so bad! Say, can you dig us up a place like that, tomorrow?"

"I'll show you a good noisy dance place tonight," said Sam. "You'll see all the pretty chickens you want--and they'll come and tell you, in nine
languages, that you're a regular Adonis."

"They don't need to tell me that in more than one language--the extrabatorious language of clinging lips, yo ho!" yearned the class-wit.

"You're wrong, Sam," said Matey. "He DOESN'T make me sick--not very sick--not worse'n a Channel crossing. And you're wrong about thinking that I
secretly wish he would go out with one of these wenches and get it out of his system. Not at all. I can get much more shopping money out of the
brute while he's in this moon-June-spoon-loon mood. And when his foot does slip, how he'll come running back to his old Matey!"

"I don't know whether I will or not! Say, do we eat?"

The head waiter had been standing at attention the while. Sam was aching to show off his knowledge of restaurant French, and he held out his hand
for the menu, but Tub seized it and prepared to put into the life of Voisin's all the liveliness and wit and heartiness he felt lacking.

"Do you sprechen Sie pretty good English?" he demanded of the head waiter.

"I think so, sir."

"Attaboy! Been in England, son?"

"Sixteen years, sir."

"Um, not so bad--not so bad for a Frog! Well now, look here, Gooseppy, we want Mrs. Voisin to shake us up something tasty, and you take the
orders from me, Francois, and you bring me the check afterwards, too, see, and don't have anything to do with that big stiff there. He's a Scotch
Jew. If you let him order, he'd stick us with stew, and then he'd make you take ten per cent. off the check. Now listen. Have you got any nice
roast elephant ears?"

Tub winked at Sam, tremendously.

The head waiter said patiently, but not too patiently, "May I recommend the canard aux navets?"

But Tub was a conscientious Midwestern Humorist--he was a Great Little Kidder--he had read "Innocents Abroad" and had seen "The Man from Home,"
and he knew that one of the superbest occupations of an American on the grand tour was "kidding the life out of these poor old back numbers of
Europeans." He tried again:

"Not got any elephants' ears, Alberto? Well, well! I thought this was a first-class hash-house--right up to the Childs class. And no elephants'
ears?" The head waiter said nothing, with much eloquence. "How about a nice fricassee of birds' nests?"

"If the gentleman wishes, I can send to a Chinese restaurant for it."

"Tub," Matey observed, "the comedy isn't going over so big. You give Sam that menu now, and let him order, HEAR ME?"

"Well it was kind of a flop," Tub said morosely. "But I TOLD you this was a dead hole. I may not be the laddie buck that locks up the Bullyvards
every evening, but I know a live joint from a dead one when it comes up and bites me. Well, shoot the works, Sam."

With a quiet superiority for which he would have deserved to be flogged, except that with Fran's monopolization of that pleasure he rarely had a
chance at it, Sam swiftly ordered foie gras, consomme, frogs' legs, gigot of mutton, asparagus, and a salad, with a bottle of Chateauneuf-du-
Pape, and though he ordered in French, so well trained were the head waiter and the sommelier that they understood him perfectly.

And again the luxurious inquiries about Home--WAS Emily really well?--how was Harry Hazzard's Lincoln sedan standing up?--what was this business
about building a new thirty-story hotel?

They had dined at nine. It was eleven when Sam took them to Montmartre, to the celebrated "Caverne Russe des Quarante Vents," where Tub was
satisfied in finding the Paris he had pictured. The Caverne was so large, so noisy, with such poisonously loud negro jazz-bands, such cover-
charges, such incredible coat-room charges, such abominable champagne at such atrocious prices, such a crowded dancing floor, such a stench of
cigarette smoke and perfume and perspiration, such a sound of the voices of lingerie-buyers from Fort Worth and Milwaukee, such moist girls
inviting themselves to one's table, such rude Hellenic waiters and ruder Hebraic managers, that it was almost as good as Broadway. A Frenchman
had once entered the place, in 1926, but he had had to go as courier to a party from Birmingham, Alabama, and he resigned and utterly gave up the
profession of courier the next day.

"Gee, this is some place!" exulted the Hon. Thomas J. Pearson (president of the Centaur State Bank, trustee of the Fernworth School for Girls,
vice president of the Zenith Chamber of Commerce, vestryman of St. Asaph's P. E. Church), and straightway he was dancing with a red-headed girl
like a little brass and ivory statue.

"Well--" philosophized Matey. "Eh? Heavens no, I don't want to dance in this stock exchange! Well, I might just as well PRETEND I don't mind
Tub's chasing after all these little goldfish, because he'll do it anyway, and I might as well get the credit for being broad-minded. Which I
ain't! You old darling, Sambo, I was sorry Tub felt he had to uphold the banner of American Humor by making a goat of himself with that snooty
waiter at that place--wh'd' they call it?--there tonight."

"Oh, good Lord, Matey, he's just like a--"

"You're going to say, 'He's just like a kid let out of school, and he's got to kick up his heels,' which if I remember the rhetoric that that old
Miss Getz drummed into my mutton head in finishing school, is both a cliche and a mixed metaphor. Oh, I adore the fat little devil! He's awfully
sweet when you can get him tied down at the domestic hearth, with no audience. But once that animal smells applause--Honestly, I think that the
sense of humor of the people that TALK about having a 'sense of humor' is a worse vice than drinking. Oh, well, it might have been worse. He
might have turned out religious, or a vegetarian, or taken to dope. The little monkey! And he's drinking too much, tonight. I just hope he won't
take enough so he'll wake up with a perfectly fierce head tomorrow, and feel so conscience-stricken that I'll have to give him the devil just to
relieve him. Oh, I can do it--and probably will!--but I want to enjoy myself, too, while I'm here, and I'm going to take home a great, big,
expensive boule cabinet, if I have to forge a check for it!"

She consented, later to dance with Sam, though it was more like charging a mob than dancing. She was nimble, for all her plumpness; and as she
did not, like Fran, point out his every clumsy step, his every failure to follow the music, he danced rather well with her, and enjoyed it, and
recovered some of the high spirits with which he had met them at the train--spirits too high and romantic to last forever.

Tub dug out, somewhere, probably in the bar, a quite respectable fellow-banker from Indiana, and two Irish girls, whose art was commercialized
but pretty, and everybody danced--everybody drank a good deal--everybody laughed.

Tub himself had so good a time that he showed the highest sign of pleasure known to an American: he wanted to "go on some place else."

They did--to another Caverne or Taverne or Palais or Cave or Rendezvous, with the same high standard of everything except wine and music and
company and then, too brightly lit to waste any more time in dancing or flirtation or anything save sitting and really attending to drinking and
humor, Tub insisted that they go back to the New York Bar, where, he assured Matey, they would "meet reg'lar fell's."

They did. In a corner table of the bar, under the sketches of Parisian celebrities, they were picked up by an American navy officer who had
magnificent lies about the China coast, and somehow there was added to their party a free-lance journalist and a lone English corn-merchant, who
talked a good deal, and very spiritedly, about the admitted fact that Englishmen never talk much and then shyly.

Tub, in one day, was a warmer habitue of the New York Bar than was Sam Dodsworth after a year. It was not merely that Sam was dogged by a sense
of dignity, by a feeling that a Prominent Manufacturer ought not to be seen about barrooms, but also that he had a certain judicious timidity
which suggested that there was no reason why the keen, hard-minded journalists who frequented the bar and exchanged gossip of kings and treaties
should be interested in him. But Tub was a Professional Good Fellow--when he was away from the oak-panel and gold velvet vestry of St. Asaph's,
the trustees' room at the Fernworth School, or the marble and walnut office at the Centaur State Bank, where he put on a pair of horn-rimmed
spectacles which somehow prevented his eyes from twinkling or looking slyly humorous.

He hadn't forgotten one of the men he had met at the bar that afternoon. He called two of the journalists by their first names, and he was in
general so full of prankishness that the lone naval officer broke into tears of relief and told them all about his most recent fight with his
wife.

But there was one flaw in the joviality. Tub had drunk Burgundy at dinner, Napoleon brandy afterward, champagne all evening, and now he decided
(in spite of the earnest counsel of Sam, Matey, the naval officer, the Englishman, the journalist, the waiter, and a few by-sitters) to show his
loyalty to America and the Good Old Days by drinking real American rye whisky--and it was a very copious loyalty that he showed.

In the middle of the commander's story about his wife, Tub began to look listless, with fine lines of sweat-drops on his upper lip--and it was
only two in the morning and he had been drinking steadily for only twelve hours, which is not even par for a representative of Prohibition
America on his first day in Paris.

Matey cried to Sam, "He's passing out! Can you take him off and kill him or something?"

In the seclusion of the wash-room, usefully close at hand, Sam washed Tub's face, fed him aspirin, scolded him, and they started home and--

All of Sam's romantic exultation was gone, the glow was gone, the childish belief that he had suddenly achieved freedom was gone, in a leaden
light of reality. He was not angry with Tub. But he had felt warmth and assurance, he had felt--he admitted it--a protection against Fran in
Tub's comradeship, and that was not enhanced in the unromantic service of holding up a man retching and swaying in a barroom toilet.

They got Tub into a taxicab, while he protested that he was all right now and desired to return to his friends. Sam had to roar at him a good
deal, and lift him in. During this knock-about scene, an open motor passed, and Sam saw that looking disgustedly out of it was Endicott Everett
Atkins, with his high nose, his Roman imperial, and his Henry Jamesian baldness. Atkins turned to say something to the lady beside him.

Sam shivered. He fancied Atkins getting the information to Fran. He heard her saying, "Now was I right about your dear friend Tub!" He felt cold
and irritated. He was less gentle with Tub than he had meant to be.



Not till Matey and he had Tub in bed did it come fully to Sam that he might do well to forget himself and think of her.

"Hard luck!" he whispered. "But we all slip now and--"

"Oh, you can talk as loud as you want," she said placidly. "Gabriel with an augmented trumpet band wouldn't wake the little monkey now! But I do
want to talk to you, and if he did wake up and want to go out again--Oh, well, there's no place to go but the bathroom. Heigh! Scandal in Zenith
society! I guess this is that new American Jazzmania you read about!"

They sat absurdly in the bathroom, she on a white straight chair, he precariously on the cold edge of the tub, while she went on:

"No, I don't mind. Honestly! Tub doesn't get really potted more than once a year, and I never did think much of the females who lay for their
menfolks and try to get an advantage over 'em when they have a chance like that. Life's too short!--too short to raise hell about anything except
some real vice, like his being humorous and making speeches. Rather be friendly and--Sam! You old dear thing! When are you going to chuck Fran
and let yourself be happy again?"

"Why, Matey, honestly, she and I are on the best terms--"

"Don't lie to me, Sam darling (you know how Tub and I DO love you!). Rather, don't lie to yourself! I know. Fran has written to me, now and then.
Awful clever and jolly and uninterested. And you don't propose to sit there and tell me that if she wouldn't come home last summer and wouldn't
come down from Berlin to see us, she isn't about ready to cut out Zenith entirely! And there's no reason why she shouldn't! She never was very
much Zenith anyway. . . or she THOUGHT she wasn't! Only, Sam darling, ONLY, if she is going to cut out Zenith, she's going to cut out you, for
even if you are kind of a Lord High Chancellor, still, same time, you ARE Zenith, and in the long run, after you've had your fling, you'd rather
see the sunshine on a nice, ragged, old Middlewestern pasture than on the best formal Wop garden in the world!"

"Well--yes--I guess that's more or less true, Matey, but--"

He wanted to tell her of the Sans Souci Gardens dream; he dismissed the matter and struggled on:

"But that doesn't mean Fran doesn't appreciate Zenith and her friends and all that. Course she does! Why, she's always talking about Tub and you-
-"

"Yeah, I'll bet she is! 'My dear Samuel, IS it necessary for women like your dear Mrs. Pearson to use such vulgarisms as "I'll bet she is" all
the time?'"

Though Matey's hearty and slightly brassy voice could never mimic Fran's cool melodies, there was enough accuracy in the impersonation to make
Sam grin helplessly, and with that grin he was lost. Matey took advantage of it to pounce:

"Sam darling, I do know it's none of my business, and you can tell me so whenever you want to, but I figured that probably you've been so alone
here, seeing nobody but the kind of folks that Fran wants, and--Sam, I've seen you change a lot, more than you know, this last ten years. You
never were a chatterbox, but you did used to enjoy an argument or telling a nice clean smutty story, and you've been getting more silent, more
sort of scared and unsure of yourself, while Fran has been preening herself and feeling more and more that it was only her social graces and her
Lady Vere de Vere beauty that kept up your position, because you were so slow and clumsy and so fond of low company and so generally an
undependable hick! And you have more brains in your little finger than--And you're kind! And humble--too damn' humble! And you want to know a
fact twice before you say it once, and she--well, she wants to say it twice before she's learned it at all!

"Oh, golly, I guess I'm defying the thunderbolt. Shoot, Jupiter.. . . Now mind you, I LIKED Fran. I admire her. But when I think of how she's
treated you, as though she were the silver-shod Diana of the outfit--and especially the way she shows it in public by being so pizen polite to
you--well, I just want to wallop her! Now tell me to go to the dickens, darling. . . . Listen to that man Tub snoring in there! THERE'S an
aristocratic, college-bred consort for you! The poor lamb! How sick and righteous he'll be tomorrow--up to about noon!"

Sam laboriously lighted a cigar, searched through a perfectly blank mind for something to say, and then, for the first time in months, he was
talking candidly about something that really mattered to him.

"Yes, Matey, I'll admit there is something to what you say. I suppose I ought to be highty-tighty and bellow, 'How dare you talk about MY wife!'
But--Hell, Matey, I am so sick and tired and confused! Fran is a lot kinder and more appreciative than you think. A lot of what you imagine is
snootiness is just her manner. She's really shy, and tries to protect--"

"Oh, I am so tired, Sam, of hearing and reading about these modern folks--you get 'em in every novel--these sensitive plants that go around being
rude and then stand back complacently and explain that it's because they're so SHY!"

"Shut up, now! Listen to me!"

"That sounds better!"

"Well, I mean--It IS true with Fran. Partly. And partly she enjoys it--gets a kick out of it--feels she's a heroine in a melodrama. . . . Damn
this bathtub--coldest arm-chair I've found in Europe." Without a smile he laid the bath-mat on the edge of the tub, heavily sat down again, and
went on:

"And she really thinks that having a social position is worth sacrificing for. And that it still matters to have a title. And I do know she makes
me clumsy. But--Well, first place, I really am an old-fashioned believer in what we used to call the Home. I hate to see all the couples busting
up the way they are. Think of the people we know that've separated or gotten divorced, right in our own bunch at home--Dr. and Mrs. Daniels--
think of it, married seventeen years, with those nice kids of theirs. And then, and I guess this is more important, Fran has got a kind of charm,
fascination, whatever you want to call it, for me that nobody else has. And when she likes something--it may be meeting somebody she likes, or a
good party, or a sunset, or music--well, she's so wrought up about it that it seems as if she had a higher-powered motor in her, with better
ground cylinders, than most of us.

"Even when she's snooty--oh, she's trying to have some FORM in life, some standards, not just get along anyhow, sloppily, the way most of us do;
and then we resent her demanding that we measure up to what she feels is the highest standard. And her faults--oh, she's a child, some ways. To
try to change her (even if a fellow could do it!) would be like calling in a child that was running and racing and having a lovely time in the
sunshine, and making her wash dishes."

"And so she leaves you to wash the dishes! Oh, Sam, it's a thankless job to butt in and tell a man that in YOUR important opinion, his wife is a
vampire bat. But it makes your friends sore to see you eternally apologetic to your wife, when she ought to thank her lucky stars she's got you!
I swear she never, for one moment, with anybody, thinks what she can give, but only what she can get. She thinks that nobody on earth is
important except as they serve her or flatter her. But--You've never been interested in any other woman, have you?"

"Not really."

"I wonder if you won't be? I'm making a private bet with myself that after another six months of carrying Fran's shawl, you'll begin to look
around. And if you do, you'll be surprised at the number of nice women that'll fall for you! Tell me, Sam. Could you fall for them?"

"Well, I don't know. I don't believe in being deliberately unhappy for the sake of sticking to a bad bargain. If Fran and I did drift apart and I
couldn't find some kind of security elsewhere, I wouldn't regard it as any virtue, but simply as an inability to face things as they are--"

"Ah hah! A year ago you wouldn't have admitted that! A year ago, if I'd dared even to thumb my nose at Fran, you'd've bitten me! Sam, you old
darling, I never have criticized Fran before, have I?--not in all these years. Now I feel that the bust-up has happened, and all that's needed is
for you to see it, and then you'll be nice and heart-broken and sulky and unhappy, and after that you'll find some darling that'll be crazy about
you and spoil you proper, and then all will be joyous tra-la--curse it, that sounds like Tub! And I'm going to bed. G'night, Sam dear. Like to
ring us up about eleven?"

As he plowed down the vast corridors of the hotel to his room, too sleepy to think, Sam felt that this saint of unmorality had converted him, and
opened a door upon a vista of tall woods and dappled lawns and kind faces.



CHAPTER 27


What Tub and Matey and Sam did during their week together may be deduced by studying a newspaper list of "Where to Lunch, Dine, and Dance in
Paris," the advertisements of dressmakers, jewelers, perfumers, furniture-dealers, and of revues; and by reprinting for each evening the more
serious features of Tub's first night in Paris.

It was a fatiguing week, but rather comforting to Sam.

Through it, the pious admonitions of Matey, along with the thought of Minna von Escher and his own original virtue, prepared him to yield to
temptation--only he saw no one who was tempting.

The Pearsons begged him to go on to Holland with them, but he said that he had business in Paris; he spoke vaguely of conferences with motor
agents. Actually, he wanted a day or two for the luxury of sitting by himself, of walking where he would, of meditating in long undisturbed
luxurious hours on what it was all about.

He had two hasty, stammering notes from Fran, in which she said that she missed him, which was all very pleasant and gratifying, but in which she
babbled of dancing with Kurt von Obersdorf till three A.M.--of a day with Kurt in the country--of an invitation from Kurt's friends, the Von
Arminals, to spend the next week-end at their place in the Hartz Mountains. "And of course they'd be enchanted to have you also if you get back
in time, asked me tell you how sorry they are you aren't here," her pen sputtered.

"Hm!" said Sam.

Suddenly he was testy. Oh, of course she had a "right" to be with Kurt as much as she liked. He wasn't a harem-keeper. And of course it would be
puerile to rage, "If she has a right to be loose, then I have the same right." There was no question of "rights." It was a question of what he
wanted, and whether he was willing to pay for it--whether he wanted new, strange loves, whether he could find them, and whether he was willing to
pay in dignity, in the respect that Fran had for him despite her nervous jabbings.

When he had seen the Pearsons off for Amsterdam, with mighty vows to meet them in Zenith within six months, when he had for an hour sat outside
the Cafe des Deux Magots, brooding on the Franocentric universe which had cataclysmically replaced the universe of business and creating motors
and playing golf, then sharply, gripping the marble top of the little table with his huge hand, he admitted with no more reservations that he was
hungry as a barren woman, hungry for a sweetheart who should have Fran's fastidiousness, Minna von Escher's sooty warmth, and Matey Pearson's
shrewd earthiness.

He dined alone in a little Montparnasse restaurant filled with eager young couples: a Swedish painter with an Italian girl student, an American
globe-trotter with his Polish mistress, pairs of white Russians and Italian anti-fascists. They all twittered like love-birds and frankly held
hands over the vin ordinaire and horse-meat. And here, as it was very cheap, there were actually French people, all in couples except when they
belonged to enormous noisy family parties, and the couples stroked each other's hands, unabashedly nuzzled each other's cheeks, looked into each
other's eyes, the world well lost.

It was spring--spring and Paris--scent of chestnut blossoms, freshness of newly watered pavements, and Sam Dodsworth was almost as lonely as
though he were at the Adlon with Kurt and Fran.

When he thought of Fran's cool, neat politeness to him, he was angry. When he looked about him at youth in love, he was angrier. This passion,
ungrudging and unabashed, Fran had never given him. He had been robbed--Or robbed her? All wrong, either way. Had ENOUGH--

Oh, he was lonely, this big friendly man, Sam Dodsworth, and he wanted a man to whom he could talk and boast and lie, he wanted a woman with whom
he could be childish and hurt and comforted, and so successful and rich was he that he had neither, and he sought them, helpless, his raw nerves
exposed. So searching, he strolled after dinner to the Select, which was rivaling the Cafe du Dome as the resort of the international yearners in
Paris.

A man alone at a cafe table in the more intellectual portions of Paris, and not apparently expecting some one, is always a man suspect. At home
he may be a prince, a successful pickpocket, or an explorer, but in this city of necessitous and over-friendly strollers, this city where any one
above the rank of assassin or professional martyr can so easily find companions, the supposition is that he is alone because he ought to be
alone.

But it is also a rule of this city of spiritual adventurers which lies enclosed within the simple and home-loving French city of Paris, this new
Vanity Fair, of slimier secrets, gallanter Amelias and more friendly Captain Dobbinses than Thackeray ever conceived, that if such a solitary
look prosperous, if he speak quietly to the waiters, not talk uninvited to the people at the next table, and drink his fine a l'eau slowly, he
may be merely a well-heeled tourist, who would be gratified to be guided into the citadel of the arts by a really qualified, gently tourist-
despising, altogether authentic initiate of the Parisian Hobohemia--a girl who has once had a book-review printed, or a North Dakota 'cellist who
is convinced that every one believes him to be an Hungarian gipsy.

So it happened that when Samuel Dodsworth sat melancholy and detached at a table before the Select, four young people at another table commented
upon him--psycho-analytically, biologically, economically; cleverly, penetratingly, devastatingly.

"See that big dumbbell there by himself?" remarked Clinton J. Gillespie, the Bangor miniaturist. "I'll bet he's an American lawyer. Been in
politics. Fond of making speeches. He's out of office now, and sore about it."

"Oh, hell!" said the gentleman next. "In the first place he's obviously an Englishman, and look at his hands! I don't suppose you have room for
mere hands in your rotten little miniatures! He's rich and of good family, and yet he has the hands of a man who works. Perfectly simple. He's
the owner of a big country estate in England, crazy about farming, and prob'ly he's a baronet."

"Grand!" said the third, smaller, sharper-nosed man. "Perfect--except for the fact that he is obviously a soldier and--I'm not quite sure about
this, but I think he's German!"

"You all," said the fourth, a bobbed-haired girl of twenty with a cherubic face, rose-bud mouth, demure chin, magazine-cover nose, and the eyes
of a bitter and grasping woman of forty, "make me very sick! You know so much that isn't so! I don't know what he is, but he looks good for a
bottle of champagne, and I'm going over and grab it."

"What the devil good, Elsa," complained Clinton J. Gillespie, "is it for you to come to Paris if you always go talking to Babbitts like that
fellow? You never WILL become a novelist!"

"Won't that be fierce--when I think over some of the novelists that hang around this joint!" rasped Elsa, and she tripped to Sam's table, she
stood beside him, warbling, "I BEG your pardon, but aren't you Mr. Albert Jackson of Chicago?"

Sam looked up. She was so much like the edifying portrait of "Miss Innocence" on the calendar which the grocer sends you at New Year's that he
was not irritated even by this most ancient of strategies. "No, but I wish I were. I am from Chicago, but my name is Pearson, Thomas J. Pearson.
Loans and banking. Won't you sit down? I'm kind of lonely in Paris."

Elsa did not seat herself precipitately. It was impossible to say just when it was that she did sit down, so modestly did she slip into a chair,
looking as though she had never had so unmaidenly an encounter, as though momently she would take fright and wing away. She murmured, "That was
TOO silly of me! You must have thought I was a terribly bold little creature to speak to you, but you did look so much like Mr.--Mr. Jackson, who
is a gentleman that I met once at my aunt's house in New Rochelle--my father is the Baptist minister there--and I guess I felt lonely, too, a wee
bit--I don't know many people in Paris myself, though I've been here three months. I'm studying novel-writing here. But it was awfully kind of
you not to mind."

"Mind? It was a privilege," Sam said gallantly . . . and within himself he was resolving, "Yes, you cute little bitch-kitty, you lovely little
gold-digger, I'm going to let you work me as much as you want to, and I'm going to spend the night with you!"

And he was triumphant, after so much difficulty, at having been at last able to take the first step toward sin.

"And now, young lady, I hope you're going to let me buy you a little drink or something, just to show you think I'm as nice and respectable as if
you'd met ME in your aunt's house, too. What would you like?"

"Oh, I--I--I've scarcely ever tasted alcohol." Sam had seen her flip off two brandies at the other table. "What DOES one drink? What would be
safe for a young girl?"

"Well--Of course you wouldn't touch brandy?"

"Oh no!"

"No, of course not. Well, what would you most like?"

"Well--Oh, you won't think it's awfully silly of me, Mr. Uh--"

"Mr. Thomas--Pearson J. Thomas."

"Of course--how silly of me! You wouldn't think it was awfully silly of me, Mr. Thomas, if I said I've often heard people speaking about
champagne, and always wanted to taste some?"

"No, I wouldn't think that was a bit silly. I'm told it's a very nice innocent drink for young girls." ("I will! And tonight! She picked on me
first!") "Is there any particular brand of champagne you'd like to try?"

She looked at him suspiciously, but she was reassured by his large and unfanciful face, and she prattled more artlessly than ever:

"Oh, you must think I'm a TERRIBLE little silly--just a regular little GREENHORN--but I don't know the name of one single brand of any kind of
wine! But I did hear a boy that I know here--he's such a hardworking boy, a student--but he told me that Pol Roger, Quinze, I mean 1915, was one
of the nicest vintages."

"Yes, I'm told it's quite a nice little wine," said Sam, and as he ordered it, his seemingly unobservant glance noted that one of Elsa's young
men shrugged in admiration of something and handed another of the three a five-franc note, as though he were paying a bet.

"Am I going to have collaboration in my first seduction?" he wondered. "I may need it! I'll never go through with it! I'd like to kiss this
little imp half to death but--Oh, God, I can't pick on a kid younger than my daughter!"

While he talked ardently to Elsa for the next half hour--about Berlin and Naples, about Charles Lindbergh, who had just this week flown from New
York to Paris, and, inevitably, about Prohibition and the novels that she hadn't yet quite started to write--his whole effort was to get rid of
scruples, to regain his first flaunting resolve to forget the respectable Samuel Dodsworth and be a bandit.

He was helped by jealousy and champagne.

After half an hour, Elsa started, ever so prettily, and cried, "Why! There's some boys I know at the second table over. As you are alone in
Paris--Perhaps they might be willing to take you around a little, and I'm sure they'd be delighted to meet you. They're SUCH nice boys, and so
talented! Do you mind if I call them over?"

"B' d'lighted--"

She summoned the three young men with whom she had been sitting and introduced them as Mr. Clinton Gillespie, late of Bangor, miniaturist, Mr.
Charley Short, of South Bend, now in the advertising business but expecting shortly to start a radical weekly, and Mr. Jack Keipp, the
illustrator--just what Mr. Keipp illustrated was forever vague. Unlike Elsa, they did not need to be coaxed to sit down. They sat quickly and
tight, and looked thirsty, and exchanged droll sophisticated glances as Sam meekly ordered two more bottles of Pol Roger.

While taking his champagne, they took the conversation away from him. They discussed the most artistic of topics--the hatefulness of all other
artists; and now and then condescendingly threw to that Philistine, Mr. Pearson J. Thomas, a bone of explanation about the people of whom they
gossiped. After half a bottle each, they forgot that they thought of Elsa only as nice young men should think of a Baptist minister's daughter.
They mauled her. They contradicted her. One of them--the sharp-nosed little man, Mr. Keipp--held her hand. And after an entire bottle, Elsa
herself rather forgot. She laughed too loudly at a reference to a story which no Christmas-card cherub would ever have heard.

So jealousy and a very earnest dislike of these supercilious young men came to help kill Sam's reluctance.

"Hang it," he informed himself, "you can't tell me she hasn't been a little more than intimate with this Keipp rat! In any case, old Granddaddy
Sambo would be better for her than this four-flusher. Give her a much better time. I WILL!"

His resolution held. Once he had accomplished the awful struggle of winning himself, once he turned from it to winning her, he began to see her
(through a slightly champagne-colored haze) as wondrously desirable.

"Probably I'll kick myself tomorrow. I don't care! I'm glad I'm going to have her! Now to get rid of these young brats! Stop brooding, Sam, and
speak your little piece! . . . I'll take her to the Continental, too, by thunder!"

Fran would have marveled to hear her taciturn Samuel chattering. Early he discovered a way of parrying these young geniuses--by admitting, before
they hinted it, that he was a lowbrow, but that he ranked higher among the lowbrows than they among the highbrows.

This attack disorganized them, and enabled him to contradict them with cheerful casualness. He heard himself stating that Eddie Guest was the
best American poet, and a number of other things which he had heard from Tub Pearson and which he did not believe. His crassness was so complete
that they were staggered, being accustomed to having gentlemen as large and as rich as Mr. Pearson J. Thomas deprecate their own richness and
largeness, and admire the sophistication of Mr. Gillespie, Mr. Short, and Mr. Keipp.

Elsa agreed with him in everything; made him ardent by taking his side against them; encouraged him till (with a mild astonishment at his own
triumphs of asininity) he heard himself asserting that vacuum cleaners were more important than Homer, and that Mr. Mutt, of the comic strips,
was a fuller-blooded character than Soames Forsyte.

And meantime, he was buying.

Mr. Gillespie, Mr. Short, and Mr. Keipp never refused another drink. After the champagne, Elsa suggested brandies (she had forgotten that it was
a beverage of which she had scarcely heard) and there were many brandies, and the pile of saucers, serving as memoranda of drinks for which he
would have to pay, rose and rose in front of Sam, while the innocent pioneer part of the table in front of Mr. Gillespie, Mr. Short, and Mr.
Keipp was free of anything save their current brandies.

But Sam was craftily delighted. Could anything better show Elsa that he was a worthier lover than the sharp-nosed Mr. Keipp?

He was talking, now, exclusively to Elsa, ignoring the young men. He was almost beginning to be honest with her, in his desire to have sympathy
from this rosy child. He decided that her eyes weren't hard, really, but intelligent.

He finally dared to grope under the table, and her hand flew to his, so warm, so young, so living, and answered his touch with a pressure which
stirred him intolerably. He became very gay, joyous with the thought of the secret they were sharing. But a slight check occurred to the flow of
his confidences.

Elsa cooed, "Oh, excuse me just a moment, dear. There's Van Nuys Rodney over there. Something I have to ask him. 'Scuse me a moment."

She flitted to a table at which sat a particularly hairy and blue-shirted man and he saw her drop all her preening in an absorbed conversation.

He sat neglected by his guests at his own table.

In three minutes, Mr. Jack Keipp lounged to his feet, muttered, "Pardon me a moment" and Sam saw him join Elsa and Van Nuys Rodney and plunge
into talk. Then Mr. Gillespie yawned, "Well, I think I'll turn in," Mr. Short suggested, "Glad met you, Mr. Oh," and they were gone. Sam watched
them stroll down the boulevard. He wished that he had been pleasanter to them--even Shorts and Gillespies would be worth having in this city of
gaiety and loneliness.

When he looked back, he saw that Elsa, Mr. Keipp, and Mr. Rodney had vanished, complete.

He waited for Elsa to come back. He waited an hour, with the monstrous pile of saucers before him as his only companion. She did not come. He
paid the waiter, he rose slowly, unsmilingly beckoned to a taxicab, and sat in it cold and alone.



Some time in the night--and he was never quite sure whether he had been dreaming or half-awake--he heard Fran saying coldly, "My dear Samuel,
don't you see at last--isn't it exactly what I told you?--that you have less knowledge of women than a European like Kurt would have at eighteen?
You American men! Fussing and fuming and fretting over the obvious question of whether or not you'll seduce that little harlot! And then unable
to accomplish it! What a spectacle! But Kurt--in the first place, of course, Kurt would have taken Elsa away from there, away from her little
parasite friends--"

It was Fran's very voice, and he had nothing to answer.



He awoke again to hear not Fran but himself jeering, "And the rottenest part of the whole thing was the cheap superiority you felt to those three
little rats of would-be artists. Poor kids! Of COURSE they have to be conceited and supercilious, to keep their courage up, because they're
failures."

And again, "Yes, that's all true, but I'll find Elsa again, and this time--"



CHAPTER 28


He slept badly; he rose at six and rang for breakfast. But at breakfast everything was gratefully clear to him.

He was so thankful that he had not gone astray with Elsa that he did not think of it for more than a second. All his thoughts blazed about Fran.

Why had he let the dissensions, the blame and impatience, all the nothings, grow into a barrier unreal but thwarting as a wall seen in a
nightmare? All that was needed was a really frank talk with her! And this trip to Paris, confessing to Matey, being idiotic with Elsa, just being
alone and away from Fran, had made it possible for him to be frank.

He'd been stupid. Fran was a child. Why not treat her as one, a lovely and much beloved child; be more patient, not be infuriated by her passing
tantrums? A child. A lake mirroring sunny clouds and thunder squalls.

Just go back and say, "Look here, dear--"

He wasn't sure what he was to say after "Look here, dear," but he would be ever so affectionate and convincing. He did love her! Fran, with her
eager eyes--

But what about Kurt von Obersdorf?

Well--belligerently--what ABOUT it! Either she was still innocent, and did not understand her danger, or she had fallen, and would regret it. In
either case, when he had paternally explained the danger of free-lance lovers like Kurt, she would come to her senses and laugh with him at this
make-believe enmity between them--yes! that was it--all a make-believe, an exciting game, like so many things in her secret and dramatic life!
And they would go home together.

He would hasten to her. Now! If possible he would fly! He would see her late this very afternoon!

He had never been in an aeroplane, for all his professional interest in aviation engines. Like most sound people, he had always been slightly
afraid of flying, but in his ardor now he despised his fear.

Then there rose such a hubbub of efficiency as he had not experienced since the most critical days of Revelation Motors. A demand that the porter
find at what time the Berlin 'plane flew--it went at nine, two hours from now. Telephoning to demand a ticket. The room-waiter rushing down for
Sam's bill. The valet de chambre packing. A motor ordered to take him to the flying-field.

Driving out, he felt a slight agitation. His much motoring had not hardened him to flying. But his apprehension was overcome by the prospect of
seeing Fran in a few hours, and when he dismounted at the flying field, when he saw the great 'plane, its metal body and thick crimped metal
wings as solid-looking as a steamer, when he saw how casually the pilot took his place in front and the attendants loaded luggage, all
nervousness vanished in exultation. He climbed up a tiny stepladder, walked across the left-hand wing, and entered the little door like a child
taken on a boat ride.

The cabin was like that of a very large limousine or a rather small omnibus. The seats were of leather, deep and easy as chairs in a club; the
cabin walls were covered with stamped leather; the pilot was to be seen, with his intricacy of instruments before him, only through a tiny window
forward. Save when he glanced out of the window beside him, Sam had no sense of being in anything so fantastic and fragile as an aeroplane. His
half-dozen fellow passengers seemed casual about the whole thing. One of them, as soon as he was seated, opened a book and did not look up for an
hour.

Sam was vastly ashamed that he had been diffident. He almost hoped for a little danger.

They started with no ceremonies--just at a gesture from the official in charge. They trundled along the ground for so long a time that Sam
wondered whether they were overloaded, unable to rise. Suddenly a little qualm came--oh, it would be all right of course when they were high in
air, going a steady course, but wouldn't it be rather nasty to leave the ground, to spin and toss as they climbed?

Actually, he never did know when they left the ground. They were bumping along the turf, very noisily, the propeller draft blowing the grass
stalks backward; then, magically, they were ten feet up in the air, they were above the hangar roofs, they were as high up as the distant Eiffel
Tower, and as for sensations, there were none save the lively inquiry as to why he didn't have any sensations.

He noted that the country below him was like a map; he told himself that he was thrilled when they passed over something like a fog bank--and
rather more like a wash of soap suds--and he realized that it was a cloud and that they must be nearly a mile high in air. But he had read of the
country looking like a map, of passing over clouds. In fact he experienced nothing of which he had not read many times--until he noted, and this
was something he had never read, that aeroplane travel, in calm weather, is the most monotonous and tedious form of journeying known to mankind,
save possibly riding on a canal boat through flat country. How tired he got of looking at maps, hour on hour! He had less relationship to the
country than in the swiftest motor, the most violent train.

It was so monotonous and safe-seeming that he laughed to remember his nervousness; laughed the more when a French business man took out his
portable typewriter, set it on a suitcase on his knees and, a mile up in the air, began placidly to type a letter.

He forgot, then, all about aviating and, just glancing out occasionally at distant green hills, he gave himself up to the thought of Fran. Oh, he
would do anything for her . . . he would make her understand it . . . surely such devotion would bring her to his arms!

They had left Paris at nine; they were due to alight in Germany, at Dortmund, at twenty minutes to three. Before one they ran into a thunder-
shower, and all the commonplace dullness of their flight was instantly snatched away.

Their little cabin seemed gruesomely insecure as the lightning glared past them, as they quivered in a blast of wind, as they ran into a dark
cloud and for two minutes seemed lost in midnight, as they came out of the cloud into rain which crashed against the windows. Sam, who had
cheerfully enough driven with motor racers at a hundred and ten miles an hour, was distinctly bothered. He was helpless! There was no ground to
step out on, not even a sea to swim in, only the treacherous and darkened air.

The man across the little aisle from Sam--and Sam never did find out what was the snarly language he spoke--looked over, laughed deprecatingly,
took out a bottle of cognac, drank long and gurglingly and, without a word, handed it over. Without hesitation Sam drank from the bottle and
bowed his gratitude.

He tried to think of Fran again, and she remained a floating pale young face that outside his window kept pace in mid-air with the 'plane. But
for a time she was only that.

They ran through the thunder-shower into rough air. They swooped upward, they fell a hundred feet--the sensation was precisely as in a dropping
express elevator, which leaves one's stomach two floors above--they rocked and quivered like a dory in high seas.

The business man, who had uninterestedly kept up his typing all through the storm, quietly rose and was very sick in a little paper bag. At the
sight, the agreeable philanthropist with the cognac was sicker, much sicker. And Sam Dodsworth wanted to be sick, and was distressed because he
couldn't be.

For an hour and more they were shaken thus, helpless as dice in a box, and when with ineffable gratitude they circled down toward the flying
field at Dortmund, Sam saw that there was another thunder-shower coming.

Had Fran or Tub Pearson been there to observe him, he might not have had the courage to admit that he hadn't the courage to go on to Berlin by
'plane, and it was hard enough in the presence of that rather demanding censor, Sam Dodsworth, but as they delicately touched the ground and
taxied along--the aeroplane as innocent and demure as though it had never thought of such insane capering a mile in air--Sam determined, "Well,
we'll call that enough for a starter, and go on by train!"

Though he reeled a little with land-sickness when he stepped out, he beamed with idiotic bliss on the recovered earth, the beautifully safe and
solid earth.

There were taxicabs waiting at the flying-field, but it came to Sam that he did not know the German for even "station" or "train." In Berlin, he
had depended on Fran. He looked disconsolately at the driver of the taxi in which a porter had set his bag, and grunted, "Berlin? Vagon? Berlin?"

"Surest t'ing you know, boss," said the taxi-driver. "Train for Berlin. Well, how's the folks back in the States?"

Sam said the inevitable.

"Was I THERE? Say, don't make me laugh! I was born in Prussia but I was twenty-six years in Philly and K.C., and then I come back here, like a
boob, and I got caught by the army, and don't let nobody tell you that was any nice, well-behaved war, either! Jump in, boss."



On the Berlin train, Sam forgot Fran for three minutes, in anger at himself for having failed to go on by aeroplane. It betrayed him as
irresolute and growing old. Was he soft? He determined that the coming autumn, with Fran or without, he would make another canoe trip in Canada;
he would live sparsely, sleep on the ground, carry on the portage, paddle all day long, and make himself shoot the worst rapids. Yes! With Fran
or without--

But it must be WITH! Surely Fran could not withstand the new passion he was bringing to her from his Paris venture.



His train reached Berlin just before midnight.

At the hotel he seized his suit-case without waiting for the doorman, and pounded into the lobby.

"My wife in?--Mr. Dodsworth, suite B7," he demanded, at the desk.

"I think the lady must be out, sir. The key is here," said the clerk.

Dismally, Sam followed the boy with his bag to the elevator.

He sent the key back to the desk. He told himself that he did so because he was tired and might be asleep before she returned.

She was not in the suite. It smelled of her, shouted of her. She had spilled a little pink powder on the glass cover of her toilet-table; on the
turned-back bed was her nightgown with the Irish lace; a half-finished letter to Emily was on the desk in the sitting-room; and these shadows of
her made her absence the more glaring. From midnight till half-past two he sat waiting for her, reading magazines, and all his furious and
simple-minded excitement grew cold minute by minute.

At half-past two he heard laughter in the corridor. Hating himself for it, yet quite unable to resist, he sprang up, turned off the lights in the
sitting-room, and stood in the dark bedroom, just beyond the door.

He heard the door opening; heard Fran bubbling, "Yes, you can come in for a moment. But not long. Poo' lil Fran, she is all in! What an orchestra
that was! I could have danced till dawn!"

And Kurt: "Oh, you darling--DARLING!"

"Good evening," said Sam, from the bedroom door, and Fran sobbed, once, quickly.

"Just got back from Paris." Sam strode into the sitting-room, turned on the lights, stood there feeling clumsy and thick, wishing he had not been
melodramatic.

"Oh, Sam, I am so glad you got back safe!" cried Kurt. "Fran and I have been dancing. Now I vill go home, and tomorrow I ring you up about
luncheon."

He glanced at Fran, hesitated as though he wanted to say something, bowed, and was gone. Fran glared at Sam with lip-biting hatred. Sam begged:

"Dear, I came back so quickly--listen, dear, I flew--because I couldn't live without you! I'm not angry that Kurt and you were out so late--"

"Why should you be!" She tossed her gold and crimson evening wrap on the couch.

"Dear! Listen! This is serious! I've come back to you, willing to do everything I can to make you happy. I adore you. You know that. You're
everything I have. Only we've got to cut out this nonsense of being homeless adventurers and go home--"

"And that's your idea of 'making me happy'! And now YOU listen--to repeat your favorite phrase! I love Kurt, and Kurt loves me, and I'm going to
marry him! No matter what it costs me! We decided it tonight. And all I can say is I'm glad Kurt was too much of a gentleman to punch your head,
as he probably wanted to, when you played that sweet, provincial trick of hiding in the bedroom to listen to us--"

"Fran, Fran!"

"Now don't play the injured and astonished small boy! You have no complaint. You've never known me. You've never known anything about me. You've
never known what I wore, what flowers I put in your study, what sacrifices I made to cover up your awkwardnesses and help you keep your dull
friends and your dull work and your dull reputation!"

"Fran!"

"Oh, I know! I'm being beastly. But I was so happy with Kurt--till two minutes ago. And then I find you here, a prowling elephant--oh yes, the
great Mr. Dodsworth, the motor magnate, who has a right to commandeer my soul and my dreams and my body! I can't STAND it! Poor--yes, Kurt and I
will be poor. Only, thank God, we'll have my twenty thousand a year! But that will be poverty among the sort of people he knows--"

She was altogether hysterical; she was tearing at her evening frock; and he was as appalled as a man witnessing a murder. He said timidly, "All
right, dear. Just one thing. Does he want to marry you?"

"Yes!"

"Then I'll go away." He had a vision of such loneliness as he had known in Paris at the Select. "Can you get a divorce here in Germany?"

"Yes. I believe so. Kurt says so."

"You'll stay in Berlin?"

"I think so. A friend of the Biedners has a nice flat to let, overlooking the Tiergarten."

"All right. Then I'll go away. Tomorrow. 'Fraid it's too late tonight. I'll sleep on the couch here in the parlor, if you don't mind."

"Very well. . . . Oh, you WOULD play the role of the patient, suffering martyr at a time like this! You have just enough native instinct to guess
that's the one way you can put me hopelessly in the wrong, and make me feel as if I'd been a dirty dog in not appreciating you--as if I must go
back and be the dutiful dull consort. Well, I won't! Understand that!" He felt as though he were being driven into a corner. "Kurt has everything
I've always wanted--real culture, learning, manners, even his dear, idiotic, babyish clownishness. Yes--I'll hurry and get it in before you
graciously throw it up at me--yes and position. I ADMIT I'd like to be a countess. Though how unimportant that part is, a man like you could
never understand. Yes, and physically Kurt has--oh, he hasn't your lumbering bull strength, but he rides, he fences, he dances, he swims, he
plays tennis--oh, perfectly. And he has a sense of romance. But you'll go around telling all the dear dull people in Zenith that I didn't
appreciate your sterling--"

"Stop it! I warn you!"

"--virtues, and that I'm a silly tuft-hunting American woman, and you'll enjoy sneering that for all his rank, the Count Obersdorf is only a
clerk and probably a fortune-hunter, and that will make you feel so justified for all your dullness! Oh, I can see what a sweet time you'll have
spreading scandal about me--"

"God!" Fran shrank at something in his face. He was standing by the center table. He had cooled his huge right hand by grasping a vase of roses.
That hand slowly closed now, his shoulder strained, and the vase smashed, the water dripped through his fingers. He threw the mess, glass
fragments and crushed flowers, into a corner, and wiped his bleeding fingers. The hysterical gesture relieved him.

She looked frightened, but she quavered gallantly, "Don't be mel--"

He broke in with a very hard, business-like: "We'll have no more melodrama on either side. I warned you that I'd fly off the handle. If you enjoy
your little game of picking at me any more, it won't be a vase next time. Now there's just a couple of things to settle. That I go is decided.
But--You're quite sure that Kurt wants to marry you?"

"Quite!"

"Been anything more than--"

"No, not yet--I'm sorry to say! There might have been if you hadn't come tonight. Oh, I'm sorry! Please! I don't mean to be quite as nasty as I
sound! But I'm a little hysterical, too. Don't you suppose I know what people will think about me--what even Brent and Emily will think! Oh, I'll
pay--"

"You will. Now will you promise me: see as much as you want to of Kurt, but promise me that you'll wait a month before you decide to sue for
divorce. To be sure."

"Very well."

"I'll instruct my bank to send you ten thousand a year, on top of your own money. That seems to end everything."

"Oh, Sam, if I could only make you see that it was your ignorance, your impotence, and not my fault--"

Suddenly he had seized an astonished and ruffled Fran, thrust her into the bedroom, growled, "We've talked enough tonight," locked the door on
her infuriated protests . . . berated himself for that ruffianism . . . sighed that he would lie awake all night . . . and, with no bedtime
preparations save removing his coat and shoes, dropped on the couch and gone instantly and blindly asleep.



CHAPTER 29


In the morning he was cool, determined to clear off as soon as possible. She was no less cool. When he unlocked the bedroom door, at eight, she
was already dressed, in crisp blue coat and skirt and plain blouse, and she looked at him as though he were a servant whom she had resolved to
discharge for insolence. She said quietly:

"Good morning. You know, of course, that your mauling me and threatening me last evening made finally impossible any rapprochement between us."

"Eh? That's fine."

"Oh. Oh, I see. Very well, that makes everything so MUCH easier. At last we know where we are. Now I suppose you'll return to Paris, at least for
a while."

"I suppose so. I'll take the evening train."

"Then you'll have a lot to do. I'm sorry to trouble you, but I'm afraid we'll have to make a number of agreements--about our house in Zenith,
about finances, and so on--it's very generous of you to go on sending money, though I certainly should not take it unless I felt that, after all,
running your house, entertaining your business acquaintances and all, perhaps I've earned it. And you'll have to pack--be something of a job to
divide up the luggage, of course, now our things are all mixed up together in the trunks. So we must get busy. If you'll be so good as to order
breakfast for us--and to shave!--which you decidedly need, if you'll permit me to say so!--I'll go down and have the concierge get your wagon lit
and ticket. And I'll telephone to Kurt. I assume you will want to abuse him for a while--oh, he won't mind! And I think it might be good for my
reputation here, so long as I'm in an anomalous position, which I can't expect you to understand or appreciate, if Kurt and I saw you off
together on the train tonight."

"Fran, I'm not planning to get out any shotgun, but I most certainly will not see Von Obersdorf again, any time, under any considerations. For
both my sake and his, I'm afraid you'll have to give up your idea of having your cake and eating it--of kicking me out and yet of having every
one suppose you're a devoted and deserted wife. That's flat. UNDERSTAND?"

"Quite. Very well. And I should be glad if you'd find it possible not to yell at me any more, just this last day, so that I'll have a little
pleasanter memory of you! Please order some orange juice for me. I'll be back by the time breakfast is here. You'll find your blue suit freshly
pressed in the closet--I had it done while you were away."



At eleven, while Sam was packing and Fran was out buying another suit-case, into the sitting-room, into the bedroom, without knocking, came Kurt
von Obersdorf, and Sam looked up to see him standing in the door, his fingers nervous on his palms.

"I know you did not want to see me. Fran telephoned me so. But you do not understand, Sam. I am not a gigolo or a Don Juan. I do love Fran; I
would beg her to marry me if she were free. But if I told you how much I like and admire you, you would think I was a sentimental fool. I have
kep' telling her she does not appreciate you. If I could bring you two together--oh, DON'T run off and desert her; she needs your steadiness! If
I could bring you two together again, and keep you both for my ver' dear friends, _I_ would go away, instead--yes, I would go today!"

Sam rose from the wardrobe trunk, dusted his hands, stood gravely in his shirt-sleeves:

"Suppose I just called your bluff, Von Obersdorf? Suppose I said, 'All right, you leave Berlin today, for good, and I'll stay.'"

"I would do it! I will! If in turn you promise me to be always more tender with Fran! Oh, I do not mean I can go forever, and hide myself. I am a
poor man. I support partly my mother. But I can be called for business to Budapest, for three weeks. We organize now a new branch there. Shall I
go?"

He looked the zealot, he said it like a crusader.

But Sam realized hastily, dismayingly, that he wanted to go; that he wanted to be free of Fran's play-acting; he realized that he was afraid to
be left alone with her fury if Kurt should desert them.

"No," he said. "And I apologize. I believe you. Here's what we've got to do. Of course I have no way of knowing just how fond you are of Fran.
But it certainly doesn't look as if Fran and I could ever get together again. Don't even know it would be a good thing, for either of us. What we
have to do is to do nothing; let things take their course. I'm going. She stays. You stay. You see how you feel, and I'll see how I feel, and if
you do love the girl--as I by God have and as I suppose I still do!--don't let any consideration for me stand in your way. I wouldn't, I guess,
if the shoe was on the other foot. Not that I'm going to say any 'Bless you my children.' I feel more like saying, 'Damn you both!' But I can't
see where you're to blame. No. Now I've got to finish packing. Good-bye, Obersdorf. Don't see me off tonight--definitely don't want it. And I
guess I ought to tell you that I'm afraid she's right. Guess you can make the girl happier than I can."

"But YOU--going alone--"

"Now hell's big bells on a mountain! Don't worry about me! I'm free, white, and twenty-one! Everybody's had too much considerateness for
everybody else in this business! I figure that maybe it would have been a lot clearer-cut if one of us had been out-and-out hoggish and known
what he wanted and just grabbed it. No. I'll be all right. Good-bye."

Kurt shook the proffered hand hesitatingly. Sam turned his back. When he looked up, Kurt was gone.



If Fran knew that Kurt had called, she gave no sign. All day she was courteous, brisk, and harder than enamel.

To pack for his journey--the journey to nowhere which might last forever--it was necessary to unpack the rather large number of trunks and bags
which these spoiled children of new wealth had found necessary. Their baggage had for months been their only home. To divide it was like the
division of property after a funeral.

But she was efficient about it, and horribly kind.

When she came to the shawl he had bought as a surprise for her that exciting day in Seville, she looked at it slowly, stroked it, started to
speak, then firmly put it away in a drawer of the bureau. But it was harder when she came to the silly shell-box.

It brought back a day on the Roman Campagna, a windy radiant day of fast walking. They had found a tomb old as the Caesars, forgotten amid long
grass, and had lunched in a palm-thatched outdoor booth at a peasant trattoria. A pedler came whining to their table with a tray of preposterous
shell-boxes, and Fran seized one, crying, "Oh, DARLING, will you look at this adorably awful thing?" It was a masterpiece; a wooden box with
cheap red velvet glued round the sides, and on top a scurf of tiny gilded sea-shells about a small streaky mirror. "Look! All my life--When I was
a little girl, we had a maid (only I think we called her a hired girl!) that had a box EXACTLY like this, and I thought it was the most beautiful
thing in the world. I used to sneak up to her little room, under the eaves, to worship, it. And I've always wanted one like it. And here it is!
But of course one couldn't buy the horrible thing!"

"Why not?"

"Oh, could we? It would make me remember--Oh, of course not! Perfectly silly, with us traveling--"

But he rose to her fancy; he demanded of the old pedler, "How much liras? Eh?" and interrogatively held up five fingers.

After much conversation which neither Sam nor the pedler understood, and at which Fran giggled helplessly, Sam bought the object for seven lire,
and that night Fran surrounded it with a pearl necklace and burned a candle in front of it. Then she had forgotten it--but not quite thrown it
away. It had made its way into one of those neglected drawers of a wardrobe trunk, one of those old attics of traveling, which contain bathing
suits, walking shoes, solid histories intended to make journeying educational, and all the other useful staples which one surely will use, and
never will.

Fran dove into this attic drawer busily; she drew out the shell-box, and stood holding it. Her eyes were deep, pitiful, regretful, and all their
defense was gone. He looked back at her, helpless. And neither of them found anything to say, and suddenly she had snatched out of the attic
drawer a never-used thermos bottle and their moment was gone.

A minute later when, after desperate groping for speech, he felt that it would be an ingratiating thing to say, "If I happen to go to Spain,
would you like me to get you any lace or embroidery or anything?" she answered suavely, "Oh, thanks, thanks no. I fancy I may run down to the
Balkans before long, and I believe there's some very decent embroidery there. I say, will you please notice that I'm putting these dress collars
not with your day collars but with your evening shirts? Heavens, we must hurry!"



When a man straggles on the short death-walk from his cell through the little green door, into the room where stands the supreme throne, does he,
along with his incredulous apprehension, along with trying to believe that this so-living and eternal-seeming center and purpose of the universe,
himself--this solid body with its hard biceps, its curiously throbbing heart that ever since his mother's first worry has in its agonies been so
absorbing, this red-brown skin that has glowed after the salt sea at Coney Island and has turned a sullen brick after wild drinking--the
astonishment that this image of God and Eternity will in five minutes be still and stiff and muck--is he at that long slow moment nonetheless
conscious of a mosquito bite, of a toothache, of the smugness of the messages from Almighty God which the chaplain gives him, of the dampness of
the slimy stone corridor and the echo of their solemn march? Is he more conscious of these little abrasions than of the great mystery?

So busy were Sam and Fran at the station--buying magazines, looking over the new Tauchnitzes, seeing that his extra trunks were registered
through to Paris--that they had no time to question whether this might be their last parting. They had dined in the crowded bar of the Adlon, too
close to others to have the luxury of mourning; she had said nothing more emotional than "If you should decide to go to America, when you see
Emily and the boy tell them that I'll come back and see them in a few months now. . . no matter what happens . . . unless they'd like to come
over to Europe. Of course I'd like that . . . I put some new tooth-powder in the bottle in your fitted case."

She was as attentive as a courier at the station; it was she who with her quick inaccurate German persuaded the conductor to change Sam to a one-
berth compartment, who prevented his giving the hotel porter, who met them with their band luggage and registered the trunks through, more than
four marks as tip.

By general, it had been he, these months, who had borne the duties of tickets, luggage, reservations, while she sat back in cool elegance and was
not shy about criticizing him for his errors. But tonight she led the expedition, she thought of everything, and he felt helpless as a maiden
aunt. He had a new respect for her. . . . Perhaps, with Kurt, she wouldn't be a child any longer, but grasp reality. That made him the more
disconsolate, the more hopeless of some future miraculous reconciliation. He saw her a woman reborn. It seemed to him that she was grasping the
intricacies of daily life in Europe as deftly as she managed everything from the cook's salary to the women's club program in America. He could
not imagine her, just now, going back to Zenith. Kurt von Obersdorf and the Princess Drachenthal and Europe had utterly defeated and put in their
place Sam Dodsworth and Tub and Matey Pearson and Ross Ireland and the Midwest.

Thus his thoughts blundered and writhed while he ambled after her through the station--to the news-stand, to the cigar-stand, to the train-gate--
feeling himself no closer to her polished and metallic briskness than he was to the bundle-lugging third-class passengers who plodded through the
echoing immensity of the train-shed; and thus, with everything necessary and unnecessary accomplished and overaccomplished, they stood together
beside his sleeper, his luggage stored, his ticket taken by the guard, and suddenly they tumbled like the falling Lucifer from the paradise of
keeping busy to the inferno of feeling. She put it off a moment. She sighted the boy trundling his little platform wagon of wine and sandwiches
and fruit; she cried, "Oh, you might want something to drink," and darted off to bring him back a flask of cognac.

There was nothing else.

The train took another diabolic three minutes to start. They walked up and down--a tail, well-tailored pair, obviously complacent and not much
interested, not very emotional.

He took her arm, as he had so many times at so many railroad stations, but dropped it with hot guiltiness.

"No, PLEASE," she said, tucking her arm into his. "It is going to be a little hard to realize, isn't it, old thing! Oh, Sam darling, you and I
can't get along together. And I do love Kurt. I stand by that! But we have been partners, good partners, in this funny business of life. . . .
We've had so many happy times, just you and I together!" Her voice lost its confidence. "Shall I ever see you again? And--oh, my blessings, my
dear--"

"Eeeeeein-steigen--bitte einsteigen!" cried the mourning voice of the guard.

"That means 'all aboard'?" croaked Sam.

"Yes. Quick!"

The train was starting as he climbed up to the vestibule. Fran stood alone. He saw her with a strange, impersonal pity. She seemed so slim and
young and defenseless, so alone in the gray city. He realized that she was crying.

His heavy mature voice became young and shaky as he cried, "Dear, did I remember to tell you today that I adore you?"

The guard slammed the vestibule door, and as through an open window he craned to look back at her, he saw Kurt von Obersdorf running down the
platform, he saw Fran droop into Kurt's arms, and he walked slowly into the roaring loneliness of his compartment.



CHAPTER 30


Kaleidoscope. Scarlet triangles and azure squares, crystalline zigzags and sullen black lines. Meaningless beauty and distortions that were the
essence of pain. Such were the travels of Samuel Dodsworth, those summer months.

He longed to go home to Zenith, to have the solace of Tub and Matey, of Emily and Brent, of streets and corners and offices that respected him
and did not sneer at him as an ignorant tourist. But to face the derision that would be his if he came back without Fran, to hear in every corner
the delighted whispering which was the vicarious vengeance of men who wanted to be free of their own wives and took out their timorous hatred in
snickering and twilight gossiping about the marital troubles of others--that he could not endure. And to face a gloating, damp, pawing pity, to
face the morons who would suppose that he was so little that he would be gratified by their libeling Fran, his Fran, and by cumbersomely
congratulating him on losing her, who was his very soul--that was not to be borne.

If he had had a job at home, he would probably have plunged back into it, and in a fury of papers and secretaries and telephone-calls have
concealed himself from the scandal. But he hadn't. Just now the Sans Souci Gardens plan seemed to him as preposterous as his lifelong belief that
he was man enough to hold his wife.

Yet twice, in Paris, he reserved passage to America, and twice he frugally went to the Cunard office and got back his passage money.

He crept over to London to hear the one language he knew, and fled from it because he did know the language, because some one might recognize him
and pity him. He went on a German tour to the North Cape and the Baltic, got off at Riga, and fled from it because he did not know the language.

He returned to England, rented a motor, and toured along the old Roman road through Kent, stopping in villages of half-timbered houses and
cottages covered with red tile shingles; into Sussex villages secret in still wooded valleys beneath the shining downs. He might have been seen,
a very large man alone in a rather small car; a lone figure sitting on the sky-cut rim of a hill, hour on hour, clasping his knees, apparently
brooding; a man alone in a public bar, listening to everything that was said--surprised and pleasant when some one spoke to him.

He felt the peace and security of the English valleys and farmsteads--and it made him the more restless because he was so definitely an outsider.
He returned to Paris, and night after night he sat in American bars, and was put down as one of the beachcombers who have been something once but
who have gone bankrupt--financially or nervously or alcoholically--and of whom one must pityingly beware.

He understood. So it came to pass that he spent most of his time alone, in his room in the Grand Universel. (It gave him a curious mean pleasure,
now, to have a cheap single bedroom instead of a suite.) He drank a good deal. Sometimes he had a cognac instead of breakfast. But between
blurred drowsinesses, he saw with clarity that he was utterly a man alone, that his work, his children, his friends, his habitual routine of
life, and at last his wife, all the props and crutches with which he had been enabled to hobble through life as a Good Fellow, were gone, and
that he had nothing upon which to depend except such solaces as he might find in his own brain. No one really needed him, and he was a man who
had never been able to depend on any one to whom he could not give.

In childish, absurd ways he managed to kill time, day on day, in a fog which now and then mercifully concealed from him the needs of Samuel
Dodsworth. Till noon he loafed in his room at the Grand Universel, frowsy in dressing-gown, taking an hour to read the Paris Tribune and Herald,
taking half an hour to shave. He managed, once a fortnight, to spend an hour in having his hair cut, and though he tried to give the appearance
of being a busy and important man, he was glad when he had to wait at the barber's; when he could, without looking ridiculous, spend that time in
turning over Sketch and the Graphic. He took to having manicures--he had despised the practise. He never admitted it to himself, but he neglected
giving a hotel address to the Guaranty Trust, so that he might have a reason to plod to the bank for his mail every day.

He was grateful to the doormen and the mail clerks at the Guaranty Trust for treating him like some one who still mattered; and when he had a
letter--they were few now, and most of them were from Fran, who seemed to desire to keep up a sisterly friendship with him--he took it with
fatuous dignity and retired to a table in front of a cafe on the Boulevard des Italiens to read it, to re-read it, though the most that he
gathered was that she had found a charming new restaurant in Berlin.

Once a man who was asking for his mail at the Guaranty Trust said, "Aren't you Mr. Dodsworth of the Revelation Company? Met you, sir, at the
motor show in New York."

Sam was so pleased that he asked the man to lunch, and telephoned to him often, to the end that the man, who had regarded Sam as one of his gods,
saw that he was merely a solitary and common human being, and despised him and was uninterested.

And always Fran was with him, scolding at his weakness; always he saw her face. At twilight, and at three in the morning, when he could sleep no
longer and rose to smoke a cigarette, he heard her saying, "Oh, Sam, I couldn't have BELIEVED that you could ever become a dirty drunk like
this!" He nestled his head on her shoulder and weepingly confessed his failure as a human being and thereafter was racked with pity for her mad
and gallant effort to be more than herself, so that he would gladly have done what he could to help Kurt to win her. . . . Samuel Dodsworth, so
abnormally flushed that no friend of his hearty triumphant days would have recognized him, sitting on the edge of his bed, his hair wild and his
pajamas wrinkled, smoking cigarettes, longing to telephone from Paris to Berlin and tell Fran that he hoped she would be the Countess Obersdorf,
and kept from it chiefly by the thought that she wouldn't like it at all and would be very tart about it if he awoke her at three in the morning.

He had known unhappiness often enough, but never complete suffering like this--a suffering so vague and directionless and unreasonable that he
raged at himself for his moody weakness--a suffering so confusing that he would have preferred any definite pain of the body. Fran was to him a
madness. Now he cursed her for disloyalty and in long unmoving silences reviewed her superciliousnesses, but the result was no stout resolution
to be free, but sudden pity for her--a fear that she would be slighted by Kurt's family--a picture of her alone and friendless, crying at
twilight. He remembered in jagged reminiscences the most grotesquely assorted things--a white fur evening cape she had once had, and how she had
prepared a lunch of coffee and salad and cold partridge on the roadside, when they had motored to Detroit; her way of saying "I am a very sleepy
young woman," and a funny slatternly pair of pink wool bedroom slippers which she had loved. He glowed in these relivings and came bolt out of
them to ache the more, till she was to him a spiritual virus from which he had to be free.



He found Nande Azeredo; and he was rather completely untrue to Fran, and while he liked Nande, he could not persuade himself to like being
untrue.

He had gone back to the Cafe Select, hoping to see Elsa and by some magic to take her away from the sharp-nosed Mr. Keipp. There was no question
now of willingness to be what he still called "disloyal," there was only a question of keeping from going insane. The moralities with which
comfortably married clergymen concern themselves did not exist for him now.

He did not see Elsa, and as he sat alone a tall, rather handsome girl, with a face as broad between the cheek bones as a Tartar ambled up, sat
down uninvited, and demanded, in an English that sounded as though it were played on a flute, "Vot's the trouble? You look down in the mout'."

"I am. What would you like to drink?"

"Grand Marnier. . . . Did she die, or run away from you?"

"I'd rather not talk about it."

"So bad as that? Good. I talk about this place here. I will give imitations of the people here."

And she did, merrily, not badly. She seemed to him quite the brightest light he had found since Berlin. His guess was that she was an artists'
model; there were few professional prostitutes to be found at the Dome or the Select, no matter how competent were some of the amateurs.

She told him that she was Nande Azeredo, as though he ought to know who she was.

Fernande Azeredo (he discovered presently) was half Portuguese, half Russian, and altogether French. She was twenty-five and she had lived in
nine countries, been married three times, and once shot a Siberian wolf. She had been a chorus girl, a dress mannequin, a masseuse, and now she
scratched out a thin living by making wax models for show-window dummies and called herself a sculptress. She boasted that though she had had
fifty-seven lovers ("And, my dear, one was a real Prince--well, pretty real"), she had never let one of them give her anything save a few frocks.

And he believed her.

This alley-kitten--or alley-tigress--read him as such geniuses as Elsa and Keipp and Gillespie and Short had never done. She knew by divination
that he was an American, a business man, graduate of a university; she knew that he had lost at love; she knew that essentially he was kindly and
solid and not to be diverted by the obscenities with which she had amused other traveling Americans.

"You are a nize man. Maybe you buy me a dinner. Or I don't care a damn--you come to my little flat and I cook you a shop. I have not got no man,
now. The last--oh, the dirty hound--I threw him out because he stole my fur coat and pawned it!"

And he believed her.

Her flushed vitality pleased him. Though she said nothing of importance, she uttered her little, profane, sage comments on the warfare between
men and women with such vigor, she so assured him that he was large and powerful and real and that she preferred him to all of the limp
poetasters about the place, that he was warmed by her companionship. And without mentioning Berlin or Kurt, without making it quite clear whether
Fran had been sweetheart or wife, he forgot his "I'd rather not talk about it," and told her rather frankly of his illness.

Then he returned to his hotel, packed a bag, and spent three nights and days in the flat of Nande Azeredo.

She astonished him by the casual, happy, utterly proud way in which she served her Man. He had not known that any women save spinster secretaries
could be happy in serving. She darned his socks and made him drink less cognac, she cooked snails for him so that he actually liked them, she
taught him new ways of love, and when she found that he did not know them, she laughed at him, but affectionately. For the first time in his life
he began to learn that he need not be ashamed of the body which God had presumably given him but which Fran had considered rather an error. He
found in himself a power of intense passion such as, all his life, he had guiltily believed himself to lack; and sometimes Nande's flat seemed to
him the Bower of Eden.

It was an insane little flat: three rooms, just under the roof, looking on a paved courtyard which smelled of slops and worse, and was all day
clamorous with quarreling, children playing, delivery of charcoal, and the banging of garbage cans. Her dishes were cracked, her cups were
chipped; the plaster walls were rain-streaked and Sam's roses she set out in a tin can; but on a couch covered with gold brocade lolled horribly
a number of powdery-faced dolls, very elongated and expensive. Her clothes were in heaps and there was no concealment of sanitary appliances. And
everywhere were instruments for the making of noise: a phonograph which by preference she turned on at three in the morning, rattles and horns
left over from the last carnival, a very cheap radio--fortunately out of order--and seven canaries.

He could not, for a time, believe that Nande, whatever her virtues, was not calculating on what she would get out of him. When they were ambling
the Rue de la Paix together (that street which Fran had seemed to know so well, but which Nande made living by telling the most scandalous tales
about the shop-keepers and their favorites among the women clerks) he buzzed, "What'd you like me to buy you, Nan? Some pearls or--"

She stopped before him, planted her arms akimbo, and spoke furiously. "I am not vot you call a gold-digger! I am not lady enough! If when you get
tired of me, you vant to give me a hundred dollars--or fifty--fine. But you must, by God, understand, when Nande Azeredo takes a man, it iss
because she likes him! Pearls? What would I do with pearls? Can I eat pearls?"

She worked daily--though not for very many hours daily--at her atrocious modeling, and somehow she managed to bring him in precisely the sorts of
English books he wanted: Shelley, for the vanity of remembering that he had been a University Man before he became a beachcomber, and detective
stories, which he really read.

"Lord!" he reflected, "what a wife she'd make for a pioneer! She'd chuck this Parisian show like a shot, if she loved somebody. She'd hoe the
corn, she'd shoot the Indians, she'd nurse the babies--and if she couldn't get Paris lingerie, she'd probably spin it."

But it was just her admirable vigor which after three days wearied him.

It was amusing, the first time, to see Nande, arms akimbo, in a shawl or a chemise, denouncing the grocer's boy for an overcharge of thirty
centimes, denouncing him with so many applications of the epithet "Camel" that he blanched and fled. But it was much less amusing, the twentieth
time she quarreled with tradesmen, waiters, taxi-drivers, and motorists--who, she believed, were in a conspiracy to run her down--and with Sam
himself, for not eating more. She was so shrill: her conversations started with a shriek and ended with a howl. He longed for a decent quiet. And
always he saw Fran watching Nande and himself in mockery.

Whenever he stoutly convinced himself that Nande was beautiful as a young tigress and a miracle of loyal kindness, the cool wraith of Fran
appeared, and Nande seemed then a blowsy gutter-looper. To his angry defense of Nande, Fran answered with the look she gave rude servants. She
watched while Nande scrubbed the floor, bawling indecent lyrics; she slipped through the room just as Nande cheered Sam by slapping his rear; and
he was turned into a schoolboy caught with the kitchen maid.

So he told Nande that business called him to Italy. She pretended to believe him; she begged him to be careful of cognac and women; she casually
accepted a present of a hundred dollars; she saw him off.

As the train was starting, she slipped into his hand a little package.

He looked at it an hour or two afterward. It contained a gold cigarette case which must have cost her all of his hundred dollars.

Nande Azeredo!

He never wrote to Nande. He wanted to, but she was not one to whom you could say anything on paper.

She seemed to him a character in a play; a rather fantastic and overacted character; but she had definitely done something to him. She had, along
with the glances of Minna von Escher, broken down all the celibacy which had plagued him, and however much he still fretted over Fran, imagined
her loneliness in Berlin, let himself be wrung by pity for her self-dramatizing play at romance which was bound to turn into tragedy, he no
longer felt himself her prisoner, and he began to see that this world might be a very green and pleasant place.



He was more conscious of the wagon lit than he had ever been, for he was wondering if he might not spend much of his life, now, in those homes
for people who flee from life. . . . Blue upholstered seat, rather hard, with hard cylindrical cushions. Above the blue velvet, yellow and brown
florid stamped leather, rough to a speculative touch. The Alarm Signal to stop the train, all labeled nicely in four languages for the linguistic
instruction of tourists, which he always longed to pull, even if it cost him five hundred lire. The tricky little cabinet in the corner which
turned into a wash-stand when one let down the folding shelf. And the detached loneliness of which he rid himself now and then by poking out into
the corridor, to lean against the brass rail across the broad low windows, or to sit on the tiny folding seat. And outside, mountains; stations
with vacant-faced staring loungers; plains which seemed to him altogether like the American Middlewest till suddenly the sun, revealing a high
and distant castle on an abrupt cliff, restored to him the magic of foreignness.



Till now, Sam Dodsworth had never greatly heeded fellow passengers, except Americans who looked as though they might be good fellows with whom to
gossip and have a drink. Of most of them, had you demanded a description from him after the journey, he would have said, "Oh, they looked about
like anybody else, I guess--why?" He saw them not as trees walking but as clothes sitting.

But the incredible jar of being dismissed by Fran, the opening of his eyes to the possibilities of misery in the world, made him feel the
universal pathos of things more sensitively than he had even on the exalted night when he had first beheld the lights of England. He felt--no
doubt sentimentally--akin to everything that was human; he saw--no doubt often without reason--a drama, tragic or comic, behind all the face-
masks of travelers, behind surly faces, stupid faces, mean faces, common faces. He a little forgot himself--and Fran and Kurt and Nande Azeredo--
as he wondered whether that tight-mouthed woman had recently been burying her husband, whether that overdressed young salesman had a nagging wife
at home, whether that petulant and snarling old man had lost his fortune. He studied the railroad workmen who stood back to let the train pass,
and speculated as to which of them was about to be married, which was an ecstatically religious communist, which was longing to murder his wife.

Thus brooding, hour-long, not having to hasten back to the compartment and entertain Fran. Thus slowly and painfully perceiving a world vaster
than he had known. Thus considering whether he was so badly beaten, so enfeebled by Fran's scorn, that he could never find the Not Impossible She
and, with her, experience the not impossible self-confidence and peace.



He poked about Rome for a week, trying to persuade himself that he was studying architecture. It was hot, and he fled to Montreux, with a notion
of swimming and cool mountains. Daily he examined schedules of sailings for New York and surmised that one of these days would find him fleeing
aboard a steamer. He drifted to Geneva, solemnly viewed the League of Nations building, and in his hotel wondered which of the not very exciting-
looking gentlemen with top hats were famous ministers of state. Then, in a small restaurant, he heard, like an angelic trump, the voice of Ross
Ireland, the correspondent: "Well, Sam, you old devil, where did you come from!"

They had many drinks.

With Ross he tramped for a week, rucksack on shoulders, through the Bernese Oberland. He felt rather foolish, at first, to be carrying a sack and
walking dustily past large hotels, for he had been trained to feel that it was undignified for him to walk, except on a duck pass or a golf
course. But he enjoyed seeing a view without the need, as a rich, busy, and motorized tourist, of having to hustle past it; he found himself
breathing deeper, sleeping better, brooding less, and drinking beer instead of cognac. In fact he believed that he had discovered walking, and
wrote enthusiastic recommendations of it on post cards to Fran, Tub, and Dr. Hazzard. He came to feel superior to large, plushy hotels. Ross and
he ate dumplings and pig's knuckle; they rested at tiny tables in front of inns when they had panted into a village, sweaty and shoulders aching.

Ross insisted that whenever they "saw church-steeples and heard the bright prattle of children," those were the signs certain and indivisible of
the proximity of beer, and however much they enjoyed the mountain-side lanes, they cheered up and hastened their step and began to listen for the
bright prattle as soon as they saw a church steeple.

And Sam decided what he would do with the wreckage of his life.

He had not known that wandering could be so satisfying as it was with Ross Ireland, who never complained and became superior like Fran, or felt
bound to be funny like Tub, or noisy like Nande; who was interested in everything from pig-pens to cloisters; and who enjoyed erecting theories
of life more than anything save tearing them down.

Ross was going to the Orient again, after summer in Europe. He invited Sam to come along and Sam accepted, with more tingling anticipation than
he had known since he had first sailed for England. . . . Turkestan, Borneo, Siam, Pekin, Penang and the sight of Java Head!

Ross was called to Paris, but that city meant for Sam, now, only too much loneliness and too much Nande, and he squatted in Gstaad, trying to be
very healthy and full of fresh air. And before Ross had been gone forty-eight hours, Sam was thrown back into as much fidgety fretting as he had
ever known.

He cursed himself for his weakness; he sought to sink himself in an enormous volume on English Gardens and Domestic Architecture of the
Eighteenth Century; he sought to recapture a longing for the Orient; and it was in vain.

Bluntly, he could not go off to the Far East and leave Fran unprotected.

Oh, he told himself she did not need protection. His presence irritated her more than it soothed her, and he was a fool, and a puerile and
whining fool, not to be able to cut loose from his mother's apron strings, now inconveniently worn by a wife. But--If anything went wrong there
in Berlin--If Fran wanted to run to him for help, and he should be ten thousand miles away--

He couldn't do it.

He wondered, occasionally, if he wasn't confusing the need to serve Fran with the need of women in general, that basic need which he had just
consciously discovered; he wondered whether, if it were a woman with some of Ross Ireland's sportsmanship and inquiring mind who had invited him
to come along, he would not have found it possible to go, armored with a good, round, satisfying cliche like "Fran made her bed; let her lie in
it."

No! He swore to himself that his care for Fran was authentic; was to him what prayer was to a hermit, and honor to a soldier; and always he wound
up his fretful meditations with, "Oh, hell, I can't analyse it, but I'm not going to desert her! Only wish I could!"

He wrote Ross not to count on his company this coming autumn, and again fled from himself, but with himself, to Venice, because the current news
photographs from the Lido, the pictures of gay companies on the beach, made it seem a place to divert a solitary man. And perhaps one of these
exquisite gold and ivory Englishwomen--

No! He didn't want that sort. He wanted some one with Fran's fineness but with Nande's sturdiness, Ross Ireland's brains.

He was able to laugh at himself: "If there were such a woman anywhere, what would she want with you?"

But as, in the too-familiar blue-velvet and stamped leather wagon lit compartment, he clanked on toward Venice, he was not quite free of the
pictures of lovely ladies on Lido beach; not quite sure that he had in life any purpose beyond the quest of the Not Impossible She.



CHAPTER 31


Sam was not particularly enlivened by the Lido in season. The hotels seemed to him to smack of the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 with the added
flavor of a Turkish bath; and the intimacy with which two-thirds of this basking, bathing, lunching, dancing society knew one another, whether
they were Italian, English, American, or Austrian, made him feel utterly the outsider. He moved back into Venice, to the Bauer-Grunwald which,
despite a German atmosphere which too readily reminded him of his Berlin debacle, was more welcoming than the Royal Danieli.

Venice is the friendliest city in the world. There are other cities in which friendlier people may be found, but in Venice it is the city itself,
the spectacle of the Piazza San Marco, the cozy little streets, the open-fronted shops of the coppersmiths, the innumerable churches that are
always open, the alternately effusive and quarrelsome gondoliers, the greedy but amiable pigeons, the soft sky, the rustling water of the Grand
Canal, the cafes thrusting their tables halfway across the Piazza, the palaces so proud in their carved balconies and so cheerfully poverty-
stricken in their present inhabitants, the crowd with nothing to do save stroll and wait for the band concerts, which are so amiable that here
less than anywhere else in the world does the stranger miss the warm gossip of people whom he knows.

Sam found the waiting into which all his life had turned now more tolerable than it had been at any time save when he had been drugged with
fatigue on his walking tour with Ross, or save when that rather soiled Salvationist, Nande Azeredo, had stooped to save him. He lay abed till
nine, content with the sound of the Grand Canal outside his windows, the squabbles of gondoliers. He rose to lean placidly on the sill and look
at the wonders of Santa Maria della Salute and San Giorgio Maggiore, seeming, on their tiny islands, to be floating out to sea; to watch the
panorama of vegetable scows, brick scows, cement scows, wangling their way into side canals, while the bargees quarreled magnificently with the
more aristocratic gondoliers and with the uniformed drivers of motor boats belonging to officials. He had a meager cup of coffee, and, buying the
latest Paris Daily Mail, Chicago Tribune, and New York Herald on the way, ambled to the Piazza for his real breakfast.

In the afternoon, Florian's and the Aurora were the accepted haunts, shaded then from the biting sun, but in the morning it was the Quadri and
Lavena's which were sheltered, and at one of these cafes he drank his coffee, nibbled at croissants smeared with clouded honey from Monte Rosa,
and read the papers, excited at the news from Washington and New York, excited when he saw that some one he knew, Ross Ireland or Endicott
Everett Atkins, had dined with a Celebrity at Ciro's. . . . And once, in the Berlin news, he saw that Mrs. Samuel Dodsworth had been the guest of
honor at a dinner given by the Princess Drachenthal and that among those present had been the Count of Obersdorf, the Baroness de Jeune, Sir
Thomas Jenkins of the Allied Commission, and the newly made Geheimrat, Dr. Biedner. He sat for a long time, looking vacantly across the Piazza,
at the spate of tourists whose wives were kodaking them in the act of feeding the pigeons of St. Mark.

He worked at his new game of architecture. With Ruskin's "Stones of Venice" under his arm, he saw daily a new church, a new palace, and now and
then he made sketches, not very bad, and was not displeased when loudly commenting tourists mistook him for an authentic artist. He lunched
simply; he slept for an hour afterward, and betook himself then to the one real duty of a wise visitor in Venice--to spend most of the afternoon
and evening sitting in the Piazza and doing nothing whatever save watch the spectacle.

It had been agreeable in Paris or on Unter den Linden to watch the parade, but there the motors, the horses, the brisk policemen had made it a
hard and somewhat nervous spectacle. Here, where there was no traffic, where the marble-walled piazza was like a stage with the chorus of an
incredibly elaborate comic opera, there was only a lazy and unharassed contentment. The crowd changed, every second. Now two Fascist officers
paced by, trim in black shirts, olive-green uniforms, and gold-badged and tasseled service caps. Now it was two carbinieri with the cocked hats
of Napoleon and the solemn manner of judges. Now a tourist steamer vomited a rush of excited novices--inquiring Germans or stolid English,
golden-haired Scandinavians, or Americans of whom the women were thrilled and the males cocked up their cigars and announced, very publicly, that
if THIS was Venice, they didn't think it was so doggone much!

The guides, slightly less numerous but much more insistent than the cloud of pigeons, attacked every one who was not entirely engaged in the
sacred act of being photographed, and yammered, "Me gide spik fine English, show you San Marco." The children fell under everybody's feet. The
gatherers of cigarettes swooped on each butt as it fell. The English couples went by amiably contemptuous. And at last the sunset turned the dark
leaded glass behind the horses of San Marco into gold.



He was content, by comparison with his active agonizing in Paris. But he was also lonely, despite the show of the Piazza. He had to have some one
to talk to, and never did he meet any one whom he knew.

It was not easy for him to pick up acquaintances. Once he sat at a table next to a party of Americans. They did not seem very complex and
difficult; they looked like small town merchants and professional men with their wives; and Sam took the chance. He leaned toward the nearest, a
spectacled little man, and drawled, "On a tour?"

The little man looked scornfully cautious. HE'D read the papers! HE wasn't going to be taken in by any of your slick international crooks!

He sniffed "Yes," and he did not embroider it.

"Uh--enjoying Italy?"

"Yes, thanks!"

The little man turned his back, and Sam was flushed and shamed and much lonelier than before.

He was grateful when he was picked up by a large and lugubrious and green-hatted Bavarian who was apparently even more desolate than himself, and
though they had in common only a hundred words of English, twenty of German, and ten of Italian, they were both strong men who could endure a lot
of gesturing. They gave each other confidence in battling with gondoliers, and together they lumbered to the Colleoni and SS. Giovanni e Paolo,
gaped at the glass-makers at Murano, and visited the Armenian monastery on the peaceful isle of San Lazzaro. Sam saw the Bavarian friend off at
the station as regretfully as he had seen Ross Ireland off at Interlaken, and all that evening he clung to his favorite table at Florian's as
though it was his only home.



He heard regularly from Fran, but where once her letters had been festal, now he hesitated to open them.

She complained a good deal. It had been rainy--it had been hot. She had gone to the Tyrol for a week (she did not say that Kurt had come along
but he guessed it) and the hotels had been crowded. She had suffered unparalleled misfortune in having to stay at a small hotel where the food
was heavy and the guests heavier. She had met a cousin of Kurt, an Austrian ambassador, and though she had showered blessings of wit and courtesy
on the fellow, he had not appreciated her.

As to whether Sam himself was any happier, she never inquired.

Her letters left him always a little blue. And they did not suggest that she would like to see him.



He was in the Piazza, meditating on one of these letters, a little after four of a blazing afternoon. He saw a familiar-looking woman pass his
table. She was perhaps forty; she was slim, rather pale. She wore black crepe, without ornament, and a wide black hat with a tiny brooch of
brilliants. Her hands were as fine as lace.

He remembered. It was Mrs. Cecil R. A. Cortright, Edith Cortright, American-born widow of the British minister to Roumania (or was it Bulgaria?)
who, on a hint from Tub's nephew, had asked them to tea at her flat in the Palace Ascagni in Venice, months ago. He darted up, to welcome the
first recognizable face he had seen in weeks; he hesitated--Mrs. Cortright was not the sort of woman one greeted carelessly. He ventured again.
He tossed a ten lira note on the table for the waiter, and, circling the square with his long stride, so arranged it that he met her as she was
passing through the Piazzetta dei Leoni and entering the Calle di Canonica.

"Oh, how d'you do," he observed. "Do you remember having my wife and me to tea last spring--friends of Jack Starling--"

"Oh, but of course! Mr.--?"

"Samuel Dodsworth."

"You and Mrs. Dodsworth HAVE come back here soon."

"Oh, she's, uh, she had to stay in Berlin."

"Really? You're here alone? You must come to tea again."

"Be awfully glad to. You walking this way?" Quite fatuously, rather eagerly.

"Just a bit of shopping. There's a rabbit-warren of a pastry shop down here--Perhaps you'd like to come along, and come home for a cup of tea
this afternoon, if you haven't friends waiting for you."

"I don't know a soul in town."

"In that case, you must come, surely."

He rolled beside her, bumbling, "Must be an awful lot of people you know at the Lido now, with the season on."

"Yes. Unfortunately!"

"Don't you like the rotogravure set?"

"Oh, that is a nice thing to call them!" she said. "I've been looking for a phrase. Some of them are extremely agreeable, of course; nice simple
people who really like to dance and swim and don't go to the Lido just to be seen and photographed. But there's an international, Anglo-American-
French set--smart women, just a little ambiguous, and men with titles and tailors and nothing much else, and sharp couples that play bridge too
well, and three-necked millionaires that--well, they seem to me like a menagerie. There's a dreadful woman named Renee de Penable--"

"Oh, you know her?"

"How can any one help it! The woman contrives to be simultaneously in Paris, the Lido, Deauville, Cannes, New York, and on all known trains and
steamers! You know her? Do you like her?"

"Hate her," remarked Sam. "Oh, I don't know's I ought to say that. She's always been awfully decent to us. But I feel she's a grafter."

"No, she's subtler than that. She is quite generous to ninety nine out of a hundred of her group--tramps in goldfoil!--so that she can get the
dazzled hundredth to set her up in a gown shop or a charity society or something else that mysteriously collapses in two months. She's--oh, she's
very amusing, of course."

"Neither do I!" roared Sam.

They smiled at each other, to the approval of seven youthful Venetians engaged in doing nothing and choosing the dimmest and smelliest
Sottoportico to do it in.

Sam rejoiced that Edith Cortright might prove to be human, patient with large lost men. He was surer of it as he heard her bartering with the
owner of the minute pastry shop for a dozen cakes. The proprietor demanded five lire, Mrs. Cortright offered two, and they compromised on three,
which were their probable value.

Often enough Sam had seen Fran chaffering, but she was likely to lose her temper, more likely to make the shop-keeper lose his. With Mrs.
Cortright, the baker shook his fingers, agonized over the insult to his masterpieces, asserted that his nine children and grand-mother would
starve, but she only laughed, and all the while he laughed back. He took the three lire with the greatest cheerfulness, and cried after them,
"Addio!" as though it were a blessing.

"The good soul!" said Mrs. Cortright as they returned to the Piazza. "We do that every week. That's really the reason why I go to him myself,
instead of sending a maid, who gets them for twenty centesimi less than I do, probably, and pockets ten. But this patissier is an artist, and
like all artists, a conservative. He tries to keep up the good old days when buying and selling in Italy really was an adventure, because
everybody made a game of bargaining--the days that Baedeker wrote of when he tells you to 'keep a calm and pleasant demeanor, when haggling.' But
that's all passing, I'm afraid. Between the regulations of the Fascists, and the efficient business of impressing tourists, the shops are
becoming as dependable as Swan and Edgar's or a Woolworth's, and about as appealing. I think I'll go back and end my few declining years on
Mulberry Street, in New York. That's about the only part of Italy, now, that hasn't been toured and described and painted and guided to death;
the only part that hasn't been made safe for the vicar's aunt."

In the presence of Fran and her aggressive smartness, Edith Cortright had been abrupt, hiding her heart behind dutiful courtesy as she hid her
taut frailness of body beneath frocks of soft, non-committal black. But now, as they tramped to the Palazzo Ascagni, avoiding the sun in arcades
and under vast walls above tiny streets, as they climbed the sepulchral marble stairs to her flat, and sighingly relaxed in the coolness of the
vast rooms behind blinds streaked with poisonous sun, she was easy; in a subdued silvery manner, she was gay. It was as though she found
everything in life amusing and liked to think about it aloud. And she seemed younger. He had thought her forty-five; now she seemed forty.

The stone floor of her drawing-room, laid in squares waxed to ivory smoothness, the old walnut of a Sixteenth Century armoire, suggested
quietness, a feeling of civilization grown secure and placid through generations. The formal monastic chairs which had dignified the room when
Sam had seen it in the spring--as well as the shameless over-stuffed Americanized arm-chairs with which Mrs. Cortright had eased the rigor of
Venetian stateliness--had been replaced by wicker with chintz cushions.

Sam's spirit was refreshed here, his hot body was refreshed, and when Mrs. Cortright showed herself so superior to Expatriate Americanism that
she dared to be American and to offer iced tea, he rejoiced in her more than in the mosaics of St. Mark's, which he had taught himself to admire
with a quite surprising amount of sincerity. Mrs. Cortright and the room which illustrated her seemed to him quite as traditional as the faded
splendors of the Princess Drachenthal at Potsdam; but he could reach Mrs. Cortright, understand her, not feel with her like an inanely smirking
boy invited to tea by the schoolmaster's wife. He was a little afraid of her, a little afraid that behind her pallid restraint there might be
comment on such a stumbling tourist as himself. But it was a fear that he could understand and answer, not a bewildering midnight strangeness.

He saw that in an age of universal bobbing, when no Fran would have dared be so eccentric, Mrs. Cortright kept her hair long, parted simply and
not too neatly. And he saw again the lovely hands moving like white cats among the cups of taffy-colored majolica.

She did not talk, this time, of diplomats and Riviera villas and painting. She said:

"Tell me--Really, I'm not impertinent; I ask myself the same thing, and perhaps I'm looking for an answer for myself. What do you find in Europe?
Why do you stay on?"

"Well, it's kind of hard to say." He sipped his iced tea, appreciative of the thin tart taste against his tongue. "Oh, I guess--Well, to be
absolutely frank, it's because of my wife. I've enjoyed coming abroad. I've learned a lot of things--not only about pictures and all that, but in
my own line--I'm a motor manufacturer, if you remember. For instance, I went to the Rolls-Royce works in England, and it was a perfect revelation
to me, the way they were willing to lose money by going on having things like polishing done by hand instead of by machinery, as we'd do them,
because they felt they were better done by hand. But--oh, I can understand how the artists that hang around places like Florence, and that don't
care whether the government is monarchial or communist as long as the tea and the sunsets are good, can be perfectly content to stay there for
years. But me--I'm getting restless at being so much of an outsider. I feel like the small boy that's never consulted about where the picnic will
be held. I suppose I'm awfully lowbrow not to care for any more galleries and ruins but--oh, I want to go home and MAKE something! Even if it's
only a hen-coop!"

"But couldn't you make that here? In England, for example?"

"No. I'd feel the English chickens wouldn't understand my speaking American, and probably go and die on me."

"Then you don't want to stay? Why do you?"

"Oh, well, my wife still feels--"

Swiftly, as though she were covering a blunder, Mrs. Cortright murmured, "And of course she is lovely. I remember her with such pleasure. She
must be an enchanting person to wander with. . . . And please don't feel that I'm one of those idiots who regard painting as superior to
manufacturing--I neither regard it as inferior, as do your Chambers of Commerce who think that all artists are useless unless they're doing
pictures for stocking advertisements, nor do I regard it as superior, as do all the supercilious lady yearners who suppose that a business man
with clean nails invariably prefers golf to Beethoven."



It was not brilliant talk, nor did it dazzle Sam by novelty. In both Europe and America he had encountered all the theories about modern business
men: that they were the kings and only creators in the industrial age: that they were dull and hideous despots. He had hacked out his own
conclusion: that they were about like other people, as assorted as cobblers, labor leaders, Javanese dancers, throat specialists, whalers, minor
canons, or asparagus-growers. Yet in the talk of Edith Cortright there was a sympathy, an apparent respect for him, a suggestion that she had
seen many curious lands and known many curious people, which inspirited him. Incredulously, he found himself trying to outline his philosophy of
life for her; more incredulously, found himself willing to admit that he hadn't any. She nodded, as in like confession.

He urged: "I've enjoyed talking with you. Look here: Would I be rude if I asked you to go for a gondola ride, now it's getting cooler, and
possibly dine with me on the Lido this evening, if you're free? I've been, uh--kind of lonely."

"I should be glad to, but I can't. You see my friends here are mostly the rather stuffy, frightfully proper, very sweet old Italian family sort
who haven't yet got over being shocked by Colleoni. I'm afraid I couldn't go out in a gondola with you unless I were chaperoned--bedragoned--
which would be a frightful bore. But won't you come here to dinner tomorrow evening--eight-thirty, black tie?"

"Be pleased to. Eight-thirty. . . . But why do you stay in Europe?"

"Oh . . . I suppose America terrifies me. I feel insecure there. I feel everybody watching me, and criticizing me unless I'm buzzing about Doing
Something Important--uplifting the cinema or studying Einstein or winning bridge championships or breeding Schnauzers or something. And there's
no privacy, and I'm an extravagant woman when it comes to the luxury of privacy."

"But look here! In America you could certainly go gondoling--well, motoring--as you liked. Here you have to be chaperoned to avoid criticism!"

"Only with one class--the formal people that I've chosen (wisely or foolishly) to live with. My grocer and my dentist and my neighbor on the
floor below (amiable-looking person--I rather fancy he's a gambler)--they don't feel privileged to help me conduct my affairs, or rather, they
wouldn't if I were so adventurous as to be conducting any! At home, they would. It's only in Europe that you can have the joy of anonymity, of
being lost in the crowd, of being yourself, of having the dignity of privacy!"

"You try New York! Get lost enough there!"

"Oh, but NEW YORK--Self-conscious playing at internationalism! Russian Jews in London clothes going to Italian restaurants with Greek waiters and
African music! One hundred per cent. mongrels! No wonder Americans flee back home to Sussex or Somerset! And never, day or night or dawn, any
escape from the sound of the Elevated! New York--no. But I am sure that there is still a sturdy, native America--and not Puritanical, either, any
more than Lincoln or Franklin were Puritanical--that you know. But tell me (to get away from my lost, expatriate, awfully unoriented and
unimportant self), tell me frankly: what have you seen in Europe--I mean that you'll remember ten years from now?"

He slumped in his chair, he rubbed his chin, and sighed:

"Well, I guess about as much as I'd get out of reading the steamship and hotel ads in a New York Sunday paper! I know a little less than when I
started. Then, I knew that all Englishmen were icicles, all Frenchmen chattered, and all Italians sat around in the sun singing. Now I don't even
know that much. I suspect that most Englishmen are friendly, most Frenchmen are silent, and most Italians work like the devil--pardon me!"

"Exactly!"

"I've learned to doubt everything. I've learned that even a fairly successful executive--and I WAS that, no matter how much of a loafer I seem
now--"

"Oh, I know!"

"I've learned that even a fairly good garage boss like myself isn't much good at deciding between Poiret and Lanvin, or between Early English and
Decorated. No American business man ought to go abroad, ever, except to a Rotary convention, or on a conducted tour where he's well insulated
from furriners. Upsets him. Spoils his pleasure in his own greatness and knowledge! . . . What have I learned? Let's see: The names of maybe
fifty hotels, of which I'll remember five, in a few years. The schedules of half a dozen de luxe trains. The names of a few brands of Burgundy.
How to tell a Norman doorway from Gothic. How to order from a French menu--providing there's nothing unusual on the bill. And I can say 'How
much' and 'TOO much' in English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish. And I think that's about all I've learned here. I guess they caught me too
late!"



CHAPTER 32


With his second drink, at Florian's, after dinner, he recaptured a rare exhilarating glow at the thought of travel, alone and fast. He could go
as he would: North, South--the very names had magic: NORTH and snow-drifts among silent pines; SOUTH and bamboo huts in the jungle; EAST and a
cranky steamer jogging up a purple strait; WEST and a bench by a log cabin in the Rockies, with a lake two thousand feet below, and himself,
strong and deep-breathing as he had been at thirty, smelling the new-cut chips, the frosty air. Yes! He would see them all! He wouldn't go back
to an office!

He had twenty, perhaps thirty years more. He would have a second life; having been Samuel Dodsworth he would go on and miraculously be some one
else, more ruthless, less bound, less sentimental. He could be a poet, a governor, an explorer. He'd learned his faults of commercial-mindedness,
of timidity before women. Correct 'em! He'd seen the gaps in his knowledge. Fill 'em!

Twenty years more!

Start right now. Tomorrow he would take up Italian. Tomorrow he would write to Ross Ireland about that jaunt to the Orient. Yes!



After the comfort of tea with Edith Cortright, he had been lonelier than ever. For five minutes he had planned to flee to Fran. But fried scampi
and a drink solaced him; a second drink set his imagination dancing. Then he wanted another drink--and didn't want it.

No! He shook himself. He hated this flabby, easy escape through alcohol into a belief in his own power and freedom. He wasn't (proudly) one of
the weaklings who took refuge from problems in the beautiful peace of the gutter, where the slime covered one's ears from the nasal voices of the
censors who were always demanding of a tired man a little more than he could do.

But was that true? Was anything he had thought true--even this easy disgust at easy escape? Was it possible that he was unable to fall
permanently into drunkenness, to disintegrate, to scorn all decent scorn and be content with a Nande Azeredo in a stinking garret, not because he
was too strong but because he was too weak--too weakly afraid of what Fran, Tub, Matey, strangers like Mrs. Cortright, would say? Was it possible
that it took more courage to be a hobo, deliberate, out and out, than to go on living like a respectable manufacturer while he ached like a
Verlaine? Was dry rot really braver than a moist and dripping rage of defiance?

He gave it up.

He was so tired of dragging out his little soul and worrying over it! If he could only be laughing, unthinking, with Tub Pearson. Or if Mrs.
Cortright had been willing to dine with him--

Mrs. Cortright. Now there was a woman! As proper as Fran and as worldly, yet as indifferent to titles and luxury as Nande.

"Mighty sweet woman!"

He thought again about that third drink, then vehemently didn't want it, vehemently retired into the respectability from which for a moment he
had thought he might escape. For at the next table was an American party, full of merriment and keeping their brother from falling by setting an
edifyingly bad example.

There were three men, three women. Apparently some of them were married to some of the others, but they seemed confused as to who was married to
whom.

They noted Sam, and one of the men staggered over to shout, "American, ain't you? Well, say, why the lone fiesta? Come over and join a live
bunch!"

Rather pleased, Sam went over and joined.

"Just arrived?" he asked, as was proper.

"You bet. Landed at Naples, yesterday," said his host. "Came over on a Wop ship--elegant boat too--and say, boy, that was some trip, too, I'll
tell the cock-eyed world! Say, I've heard about wet voyages, but this trip--say, I bet I never went to bed before three G.M. once, the whole way
over! And the girls--say, they were just as good as the men. Dorine here, she drank two bols champagne in two hours, and the whole bunch were so
crazy about the Italian officers--say, the officers had to brush 'em off the bridge every time they wanted to do any fancy navigating! And that
gave us boys a chance to get in a little petting ourselves! Some trip! Say, if you could have seen the nightshirt parade the last night out! Boy!
Some trip!"

One of the women--and save for her damp eyes a most spinsterish and unaphrodisiac lady she appeared--cried, "Some trip is right! And I've got a
date to meet the second officer in Paris. He's going to lay off one trip. And maybe I'll just keep him laid off. Maybe I'll decide to buy me a
nice little boy friend. Some baby! Oh, those Or-i-ental eyes! Say, Pete, for the love o' Gawd, ain't you going to buy our little friend here"--
she pointed at Sam with a thin, chaste, overmanicured, and rather wobbly forefinger--"a lil drink?"

But Sam declined. His vision of the beauties of the gutter had vanished with haste and a ludicrous squawking. He was grimly again the Sam
Dodsworth who was proud of keeping in shape. He accepted, with irritating signs of pleasure, a lemonade (it was the first he had tasted in
months) and sat wondering about these fellow-countrymen.

He could not place them. In age they seemed to run from thirty to forty. They were not so vulgar nor so vicious as at first they seemed. Once in
a while they were betrayed by alcohol into revealing that they did have vocabularies and had perhaps read a book. He suspected that two out of
the three men were university graduates; that all six of these loud-mouthed libertines were, at home, worthy deacons and pall-bearers. He had
known in Zenith of "young married couples," theoretically responsible young doctors and lawyers and salesmen, who turned dances at country clubs
into a combination of brothel and frontier bar. But he had not gone to such dances. These people were none of his! Then, shocked, he realized
that perhaps they were. Were these oafs anything but younger and gayer and slightly more amorous Tub Pearsons?

They were not altogether to blame. They were the products of Prohibition, mass production, and an education dominated by the beliefs that one
goes to college to become acquainted with people who will later be useful in business, and that the greatness of a university is in ratio to the
number of its students and the number of its athletic victories.

Or so Sam brooded.

He had heard much of the "sexually cold American woman." Heaven knows, he raged, he had felt it in Fran! Yet with these riotous women, it was the
lack of chill which he resented. The amiable lady who was going to "buy her" a second officer had, during Sam's stay at the table, kissed one of
the men, held the hand of another, and was now turning her withered excitement on himself: "Say, you're some husk! Gee, I bet you hurt the lil
ole golf ball's feelings when you slam it one!"

He smiled bleakly.

He thought of seeing Mrs. Cortright next evening. He had recalled her only as a pleasant, unexciting, worthy person, but now he saw her as a
Grecian vase, he saw her as a bowl of alabaster within which a fire could be lighted.

"A finish to her--like a European," he reflected. "Yet she's American, thank God! I couldn't fall for a real European. Has to be somebody that
could look at an old gray New England barn with the frost on it, in October, and get a kick out of it, without my having to explain."

His long, ambling thoughts were interrupted by his original host's inquiring:

"You been here in Venice some time?"

"Yes. Several times."

"Well, maybe you can explain--Hope I'm not stepping all over anybody's feet, but me--Well, this is the first time I've ever been abroad, and I'd
always thought Venice would be kinda like a musical comedy. But of all the darn' slow places--Why, there isn't a first-class cabaret in town!
Nothing but a lot of run-down tenements with a lot of carvin's on 'em and a bunch of Chicago Drainage Ditches in between!"

"Well, I like it!"

"But what do you like about it?"

"Oh, lots of things. Especially the architecture."

But what his mind saw, as he blurted out something about being tired and took his leave, was no vision of arching bridges, of secret alleys and
the quivering reflection of airy towers; it was the memory of Edith Cortright serene in her Venetian palace.

"She couldn't possibly go out and grab things, like Fran," he reflected, as he clumped toward the Bauer-Grunwald. "She's definitely a 'great
lady.' Yet I'll bet that at heart she's lonely. She wouldn't mind cooking for her man any more than Nande would. Oh, damn it, Sam, why are you so
simple? Why do you insist on thinking everybody else is lonely, merely because you are?"



It was a small and placid dinner at Edith Cortright's, on Thursday evening. The only guests besides Sam were an English couple who were vaguely
and politely something important--very politely but very vaguely. If Sam did not find them cheery, he was amused by the pleasant carelessness of
Mrs. Cortright's household.

The Fran who liked to quote poems about Gipsies and Villon and the Brave Days When We Were Twenty-one was, in private life, a sergeant major.
Theoretically, she was the mother confessor and breezy confidante of all her servants and of the plumber, the postman, and the bootlegger.
Practically she was always furious at their incompetence. She was chummy with them only when they assured her of her beauty and power; when the
seamstress gurgled that Fran had the most exquisite figure in Zenith, or when the corner druggist asked her if his new hat was really correct
English style.

Or so Sam brooded.

Edith Cortright seemed to have no discipline, no notion as to her servants' duties. They argued with her. They contradicted her. The butler said
that she HAD ordered broccoli; and the maid came in with clacking slippers. They were always chattering. They seemed to be sharing some secret
joke with her; and when she smiled at Sam, in her tired way, after a voluble colloquy with the butler, he wished he could be admitted to their
tribal companionship.

A stone floor the dining-room had, and walls of hard plaster, with strips of Syrian embroidery. About the walls were chairs, stately,
uncomfortable, inhuman. The windows, giving on the Grand Canal, were immensely tall. It was an apartment for giants to live in. Sam felt that
into this room had strode men in armor who with gigantic obscene laughter had discussed the torture of pale protestants against the Doge, and
that they; not so unlike Edith Cortright for all her gentleness, had guffawed here with servants purple-uniformed, slatternly, and truculent.

The English couple crept away early. After their flutter of good-bye's, Sam lumbered to his feet and sighed, "I guess I'd--"

"No. Stay half an hour."

"If you'd really--And how I have come to hate hotels!"

"You really liked having a home."

"I certainly did!"

"Why do you stay away from it? Isn't it--"

Then she laughed, lighted a cigarette, held it with arching fingers. "I suppose it's rather ludicrous, my trying to give advice--and my own life
such a mess that I endure it only by getting rid of all ambition, all purpose, and just floating, trying to get along with as little complication
as possible."

They talked slowly, and mostly they talked in silence. It was tranquil in that vast cool room above the Grand Canal. Out on the harbor, bands of
singers in gondolas chanted old Italian ballads. They were, actually, rather commercialized, these singers; not for romance and the love of
moonlight were they warbling, and between bursts of ecstasy they passed the hat from listening gondola to gondola, and were much rewarded by
sentimentalists from Essen, Pittsburgh, and Manchester. The songs were conscientiously banal--"Donna e Mobile" and "Santa Lucia" for choice. Yet
the whole theatric setting and the music across the water lured Sam into a still excitement.

"I can't imagine you in any complications," he wondered.

"I shouldn't use that word, perhaps. All the complications are inside myself. It's just that certain conditions of life have rather taken my
confidence in myself away from me, and I'm so afraid of doing the wrong thing that it's easier to do nothing."

"That's how I feel myself! Though with you, I can't imagine it--you're sure of yourself."

"Not really. I'm like a man learning a new language--he can do it beautifully as long as he can introduce the subjects of conversation and use
the words he knows--he can talk splendidly about Waiter, bring two more coffees, or What is the next train for Turin, but he's lost if somebody
else asks the questions and insists on talking about anything beyond page sixty in the Hugo Method! Here, in my own flat, with my own people, I'm
safely on this side of Page Sixty, but I'd be horribly fluttered if I stepped out on Page Sixty-one! . . . By the way, I shall be very happy if
you're bored by your hotel here and care to come in for tea now and then."

"Awfully good of--"

Without much consciousness of rising, he had strolled to the open window. "I do appreciate it. . . . Feel rather at loose ends."

"Why don't you tell me about it? If you care to. I'm a good confidante!"

"Well--"

He flung out with a suicidal defiance.

"I don't like to whine--I don't think I do, much--and I don't like admitting I'm licked. But I am. And I'm getting a little sick of not being
able to sleep nights, brooding about it. Too damn much brooding probably!" He tramped out to the narrow balcony, above the canal and the sound of
splashing water. On this balcony once (though Sam did not know it) Lord Byron had stood, snarling to a jet-bright lady a more pitiful and angry
tale.

Edith Cortright was beside him, murmuring--oh, her words were a commonplace "Would you like to tell me about it?" but her voice was kind, and
curiously honest, curiously free of the barriers between a strange man and a strange woman. And with her Venice murmured, and the songs of love.

"Oh, I suppose it's a very ordinary story. My wife is younger than I am, and livelier, and she's found a man in Berlin, and I guess I've lost
her. For keeps. . . . Oh, I know I oughtn't to undress in public like this. But I swear I haven't before! Am I rotten to--"

She said quickly, "Don't! Of course you're not. I'd be glad if I could tell my own story."

"Please!"

"And I haven't told people, either, not even my friends, though I suppose they guess--Perhaps you and I can be franker with each other because we
are strangers. I do understand how you feel, Mr. Dodsworth. I suppose the people I know here and in England and at home believe that I lead such
a nun-like existence because I had an idolatrous worship of the late Honorable Cecil R. A. Cortright. Such a charming man! Perfect manners, and
too perfect a game of bridge! Wonderful war record--M.C., D.S.O. Actually my husband was--He was a dreadful liar; one of these hand-kissing,
smiling, convincing liars. He was a secret drunkard. He humiliated me constantly as a backwoods American; used to apologize to people, oh, so
prettily, when I said 'I guess' instead of the equally silly 'I fancy.' And his dear mother used to congratulate me on my luck in having won her
darling. Oh, I'm sorry! Beastly of me! Fatal Venetian night!"

Her quick breath was not a sob but a sound of anger. Her hand gripped the thin fluted railing of the balcony. He patted it shyly and said, as he
would to his daughter Emily, "Maybe it's good for both of us to tell our troubles a little. But--I wish I could HATE my girl. I can't. And I
imagine you can't hate Cortright. Might be good for us!"

"Yes," dryly. "It would. But I'm beautifully beginning to be able to. I--Have you ever seen Malapert's etchings? Let me show you a book of them I
received today."

He dutifully looked at etchings for fifteen minutes, and said farewell rather pompously.

Trudging home, along dark pavements which hung like shelves above swarthily glittering rios, through perilous-looking unlighted archways, he was
by turns guilty over having talked of Fran, impatient with himself for having too touchy a conscience, raging at the late Cecil Cortright as a
scoundrel, and joyous that behind her fastidious reticence Edith Cortright could be blunt.

It was the guiltiness which persisted when he awoke. Edith would be hating him for having blatted about Fran, for having led her to talk. When
for half an hour he had been trying to compose a note of apology, a note came from her:


No, you did not say anything you should not have, and I don't believe I did. I write this because I think I know how remorseful all Americans are
after we have said something we really think. Put it down to Santa Lucia who, though I don't really know my hagiology, is probably the patroness
of sentimentalists like you and me. Would you like to come in for tea at five today?

EDITH CORTRIGHT.



CHAPTER 33


Daily, for a fortnight, he saw Edith Cortright--at tea, at dinner, at lunch on the Lido. She apparently forgot her discomfort at being
unchaperoned, and went architecture-coursing with him, went with him to the summer opera, sailed with him to Torcello and Malamocco--sailing
gondola with orange lateen sail, from which they looked back to Venice floating on the dove-colored water.

He talked, of Zenith and Emily, of motors and the virtues of the Revelation car, of mechanics and finance. He had never known another woman who
was not bored when he tried to make clear his very definite, not unimportant notions on the use of chromium metal. And she, she talked of many
things. She was a reader of thick books, with a curiosity regarding life which drifted all round its circumference. She talked of Bertrand
Russell and of insulin; of Stefan Zweig, American skyscrapers, and the Catholic Church. But she was neither priggish nor dogmatic. What
interested her in facts and diagrams was the impetus they gave to her own imagination. Essentially she was indifferent whether the world was
laboring toward Fascism or Bolshevism, toward Methodism or atheism.

He followed her through all her mazed reflections. He was not rebuffed by her ideas as so often he had been by Fran's pert little learnings. (For
Fran wore her knowledge as showily as she wore her furs.)

Of themselves they talked rarely, and they believed that they talked but little of Fran and Cecil Cortright. Yet, lone sentence by sentence, they
told their married lives so completely that Sam began to speak of "Cecil" and Edith of "Fran," as though they four had always been together. When
she realized it, Edith laughed.

"We ought to make an agreement that I shall be allowed to speak of Cecil for just as many minutes as you do of Fran. Or we might compose a sort
of litany--


'Oh, Lord, Cecil was irritable before breakfast, 'And Lord, Thou knowest Fran did not appreciate streamline bodies'!"


And once she got below the surface and told him that subconsciously he had WANTED to lose Fran to Kurt, or to any other available suitor.

Yet there was always between them a formality, even when they used each other's first names as well as those of their eternally problematic
mates. They did not discuss their souls. They did not discuss why it was that they seemed to like each other. The nearest they came to intimacy
was in planning, almost childishly, their "futures."



He said abruptly, at coffee after dinner in Edith's flat, "What shall I do? Shall I go back to America, without Fran? And shall I do the job I've
been trained to, or play with some experiments? Let me tell you of a couple of silly ideas I have."

He outlined his plans for caravan building, and for venturing on Sans Souci Gardens villages.

"Why not do both?" suggested Edith. She seemed to take his desired experiments more seriously than had Fran. "I like your idea of trying to make
a suburb that would be neither stuffy nor too dreadfully arty--no grocery clerks coaxed to dance on the green. And the caravans would be fun.
Cecil and I had one for two months in England."

"Do you mean to say you did the cooking?"

"Of course I did! I'm an excellent cook! I babble of Freud and Einstein, but I know nothing about psycho-analysis, nothing about mathematics. But
I do know garlic and taragon vinegar! I really love housekeeping. I should have stayed in Michigan and married a small-town lawyer."

"Could you like a town like Zenith? After Venice?"

"Yes if I had a place of my own there. Here, everything decays--lovely decay, but I'm tired of being autumnal. I'd like hot summer growing and
spring budding for a change--even if the corn-stalks were ugly!"

Then, first, did it occur to him that it was not quite ludicrous to think that Edith and he might some day return together to Zenith, to work and
to life. He said little to himself, nothing at all to her, of what seemed dimly to be growing as a secure and healing love, yet a day or two
after he seized the impulse and showed Edith the letter from Fran.



Fran's letter revealed more of herself and of her relation to Kurt than anything she had written:


I haven't heard from you for a week, old man, I admit I haven't been much on correspondence either but I haven't been feeling any too merry and
bright, I think too much city I really MUST get out into the country and Kurt and I--you really are an old DARLING and awfully generous I realize
it to let me talk so frankly about him and still be friends with me--we're going to try to go to the Harz Mountains for a week.

It's been a funny thing--you always think I have no meekness but honestly I have shown quite biblical humility in trying to fit myself to his so-
different life. He's let me fuss over his funny PATHETIC little flat--oh, Sam, it just breaks my heart the way that flat reveals how POOR the
poor man is, that ought to be a great nobleman like his ancestors and I suppose would have been if it hadn't been for the war which after all was
not his fault. At first I was irritated by the complete sloppiness etc. etc. of his dear funny old servant then I thought maybe it was because
she has such an ELEMENTARY kitchen equipment, honestly it was about what you would expect in Kurt's native wilds a FRIGHTFUL old coal stove that
she has to stoke up all the time and the flues do not draw. I wanted to give him a jolly new electric range and he finally consented, though not
readily, honestly--please, pretty please, I hope this won't hurt your feelings and as I say I know how GENEROUS you are, but you can't have any
idea how proud he is! But it was the cook who balked. No! She wouldn't have a nice new electric range or an electric dish-washing machine! She
PREFERRED their own familiar things! She's truly feudal--isn't that almost as hard as "truly rural" that we used to say in school!--and so is
Kurt. I think perhaps I realized that with a chauffeur, of course Kurt can't afford his own chauffeur or even car yet though I do believe with
his real genius for finance he will be a very rich man on his own inside another ten years but he can't afford one now but whenever he can get
him he uses an Austrian chauffeur at a hire garage near here that was a private in Kurt's own regiment during the war and that really is almost
practically like Kurt's own chauffeur.

Well, at first do you know I was shocked by their chumminess. The chauffeur would tell the Herr Graf that the Herr Graf was wearing lovely new
gloves today, and Kurt would ask him about his sweetheart and they would joke about it and Kurt would tell him he ought to make his sweetheart an
honest woman and the chauffeur would waggle his finger in a knowing way that made me angry, and so one day I jumped on Kurt about it and my dear!
the way he turned on me!

He said, "You are a bourgeoise! I am feudal! We who are feudal can be familiar with our servants because we know they cannot ever be
impertinent!"


Sam laid down the letter, and it was of Edith and her way with servants that he was thinking.


I find myself settling, dear old man, no matter if we have apparently busted up for keeps and it IS rather tragic if one suffers one's self to
think about it after the many, many happy years we DID have together, DIDN'T we, but if we did break up, I do know you will go on being my FRIEND
and be glad to know that I DO find myself settling down to my job of being a European. It hasn't been easy and I can't expect you to understand
the pains, the almost agony I have given to it. Sometimes I am frankly lonely--for whatever you may say about me to Tub and your DEAR Matey, oh,
Sam, I suspect you talked about me to her in Paris far more than you ever admitted--but I mean, whatever you may say about me, perhaps with a lot
of justice, at least you must admit that one of my probably few virtues has been a rather rare FRANKNESS and HONESTY, and frankly at times I have
been very lonely, have wished you were here so I could tousle your funny old thick hair. And sometimes I have been frightened by the spectacle of
one lone femme Americaine facing all of censorious Europe. And sometimes--you know his dear childish enthusiasm without very much discrimination-
-I have been a little bored by some of Kurt's Dear Old Friends. Yet I love and I think I am coming to really understand the THICKNESS of European
life. Our American life is so thin, so without tradition.


Sam laid down the letter and thought of the tradition of pioneers pushing to the westward, across the Alleghenies, through the forests of
Kentucky and Tennessee, on to the bleeding plains of Kansas, on to Oregon and California, a religious procession, sleeping always in danger,
never resting, and opening a new home for a hundred million people. But with no comment he read on:


I have learned, and I must say with some surprise which has probably been good for my little ego that Kurt thinks much more of a violinist or a
chemist than of the nicest prince with the most quarteriest quarterings living. And--for whatever you may think about me you must admit that I DO
understand the Europeans and I really am European!--and do grasp it--I haven't had too much difficulty following him. Oh, my dear, do forgive me
if this hurts you, but he is what the romantic novelists call MY MAN! I have some stunning plans for him. I think I see the way, I can't of
course give away any details even to you, but I think I see a way of getting a certain great American bank to establish a branch in Berlin, and
making Kurt the head of it.

You would probably be amused you certainly wouldn't know your wild Fran how meek she is if you saw her letting Kurt boss her in all sorts of
little things yes and I suppose big ones too but still he IS so dear--he always notices what I wear, honestly he bullies me really dreadfully
about my clothes but at the same time is always willing to go shopping with me which you must admit, for all your gorgeous bigness you never
were. Oh my dear I suppose it is unpardonable to write to YOU about HIM this way and if I stop to think about it and re-read this letter probably
I never shall mail this letter that I'm writing in my ducky little coloraturo (or is it coloratura) flat on an evening that if I must confess is
a little lonely and makes me feel like a lost lorn tourist AMERICAN but we are friends aren't we--phone ringing must answer bless you,

F.


He had the letter at ten in the morning. At twelve he was ringing at Edith's flat. He thrust Fran's letter at her without a word. When Edith had
read it she sighed, and suggested:

"It's so hot here. I've been thinking of going down to Naples--to Posilipo, out on the point, where it's cool--and taking a little house on the
estate of the Ercoles. Baron Ercole has a big place, but he's frightfully poor. He's an ex-diplomat; he teaches law in the University of Naples;
and the poor darlings live mostly by renting villas on their place. Why don't you come down with me? I don't think there's much more to be said
about your Fran, after this letter. It might be good for you to swim and sail at Naples, instead of sitting here brooding. Would you like to
come?"

"Decidedly! But what about your friends who are so eager to be scandalized--"

"Oh, not the Ercoles. They'll believe I'm having an affair with you, and be delighted--they've lived in too many countries, in the diplomatic
corps, to have many morals. They'll like you. Edmondo Ercole and you will have such a good time being silent together! Oh, that sounds like Fran,
I imagine! I'm sorry!"



In the sunset an Italian hilltown, battlements and a shaggy tower on a rock abrupt amid the sloping plain. The windows of the town took the low
sunlight and blazed one after another as the train passed. "As though the houses were full of gay people," said Edith. He looked at it with still
pleasure. He felt that her presence had unlocked his heart; had enabled him, for the first time, to see Italy.



He had, theoretically, been in Naples before, but as they drove from the station to the Villa Ercole he realized that all he had seen--all he had
seen anywhere in Europe--had not been the place itself but Fran's hectic and demanding attitudes; her hysteria of delight over a moonlight, or
her hysteria of annoyance over bad service. In Edith's quiet presence he perceived that Naples was not, as he had remembered it, a rather grim,
very modern barricade of tall apartment houses, but a series of connected villages extending for miles along the bay, between blue water and
hills into which human beings had burrowed like gophers.

The driver of their taxi, being Neapolitan, was in a rage so long as any vehicle was on the road ahead of him, and as that was always, their
journey was a series of escapes from death. Yet even in this chariot race, Sam expanded and nestled into contentment, as in the old days of
overwork and brief vacations he had relaxed into delight on his holidays in a canoe.

He patted Edith's hand in an effort to express his happiness, as he saw Vesuvius roll up, with its trail of smoke--toward Naples, now, promising
good weather; saw Capri with the dots of white houses on the lofty plateau between the ruin-dotted mountains; saw sun-washed Sorrento at the foot
of its giant promontory; saw the villas of Posilipo below the cliff up which their taxi was racing.

The taxi passed a yellow plaster gatehouse, with a bobbing concierge--a smiling, life-loving, plump Italian woman, with innumerous children about
her--and instantly they were free of the roaring thoroughfare, free of banging traffic, ejaculatory drivers, shouldering trains, suicidal
children, and cluttered little shops for the sale of charcoal and wine. The park of the Villa Ercole dropped from that high-lying thoroughfare
down to the bay, with a roadway twisting and redoubling on itself like a mountain trail. They sped among enormous pines, between whose framing
trunks he saw, across the suave bay, the bulk of Vesuvius, as absolute in its loneliness as Fujiyama. They passed half a dozen plaster villas,
yellow as old gold, very still, remembering glories not quite past. In a modern stone wall, supporting a stretch of the corkscrew road, was a
patch of thin ancient Roman brick set in a herring-bone pattern and above it the fragment of a marble bust, the head of a warrior whose villa may
have stood here two thousand years ago.

There was no sound, even of birds, no sound from the street above--a minute away yet inconceivably far.

"Lord, how quiet it is here!" said Sam.

"That's why I wanted to come here--that and the Ercoles."

On the last sweeping curve of the driveway, just before it came to an end before the tall chateau in which the Ercoles themselves still dwelt,
Edith bade the driver halt at a tiny wooden bridge which led across to what seemed to be the top story of a yellow plaster tower whose lower
stages were hidden beneath the cliff beside them.

"There's our house!" she said. "It's the funniest house in the world! It's on three levels. The garden is so steep that you can enter it from any
floor. And there are really only about two rooms to a floor."

She led him, across the bridge and along a toy-house hallway, to the simplest of bedrooms. The floor was of shining stone; on the walls there
were no pictures, but only a majolica Virgin and Child. The high narrow bed, with neither headboard nor footboard, had four slender posts at the
corners. It was covered with a gold encrusted brocade, rather worn. There was a naked-looking white steel washstand, a fine oval mirror, two
heavy brocade chairs, a heavy oak table set out with pens and stationery, a brazier for charcoal, and nothing else whatever--yet there was
everything, for outside the French windows was a terrace, apparently the roof of a room below, which gave on the bay, so that the room was filled
with the sparkle of southern sun on southern waters and with the image of Mount Vesuvius and its distant indolence of smoke.

"This is your room, I suppose," said Edith. "But, good heavens, there's no wardrobe, no place even for your brushes and razor! Bianca--Baroness
Ercole--probably hasn't been able to afford them yet--wrote me she was just refurnishing this house, hoping to rent it."

"I don't mind. Keep my stuff in wardrobe trunk," said Sam. He was glad of the simplicity, glad that the room was free of the stuffiness of much
furniture. He could see himself rejuvenated here, in this cool shrine, with the sweet air and the beaming sea outside, and with Edith's
unsentimental friendship to make him believe in himself.

They went on the balcony-terrace and Sam cried out. The shore-line from Posilipo to Naples, which had been below them and hidden from them on
their drive to the villa, was romantic enough for a Christmas calendar--and no amount of Fran's scolding had kept Samuel Dodsworth from liking
chromo art. The bay was edged with cliffs, eaten into vast caves. Mysterious stairways climbed from the rocks at the edge of the water,
disappearing into holes in the cliffs. Sam reflected how excited he would have been as a boy to find these vanishing stairways, after reading in
Stevenson and Walter Scott of secret passageways, of smugglers and underground chambers.

To a tiny beach at the foot of a cliff a fisher-boy, barefoot and singing, was drawing up his unwieldy boat. His skin was golden in the sunlight.

It is true that just then shot into sight a four-oar shell, rowed by members of a club fostered by the Fascists, but this spectacle, contemporary
as though it were on the Thames, Sam ignored. It did not suit his romantic private vision of the Bay of Naples.

The villas along the bay were white and imposing upon the cliff-tops, at the head of sloping canyons filled with vines and mulberries, or, set
lower, mediaeval palaces of arcaded and yellowed marble with their foundations in the water. It was late in the afternoon, and the mellowed glow
lay on distant Naples, vast tawny pyramid rising to the abrupt bastions of Castel Sant' Elmo, a city enchanted, asleep these hundreds of years in
the lazy light.

He muttered, "This place--this place--"

"Yes. Isn't it!" she said.

For hours they seemed to have been absorbed in the kindly radiance but it was probably three minutes since they had entered the house. No servant
had answered her knock on entering, none had disturbed them since. They continued exploring; went down the rough stone staircase of the tower-
cottage, found her bedroom, as primitive as his; and down to the ground floor. They came into a drawing-room, floored with waxed and polished
tiles of old dark red, a room large enough to tolerate fifteen-foot windows hung with damask, full-blooming camellia trees in tall stone wine-
jars, and a long table of rosewood decorated with bronze, a table over-decorated yet curiously elegant. Sam scarcely noticed two women, in calico
and dust-caps, who were on their knees finishing the polishing of the floor. He gaped when the younger and more slender sprang up, fled to Edith
Cortright, and kissed her.

Edith said, smiling, brisker than he had ever known her, "Bianca, this is my friend Mr. Dodsworth--Sam, your hostess, Baroness Ercole."

And, altogether unabashed at being caught in the crimes of poverty and work, the Baroness Ercole made him welcome with her smile, gave him her
wax-crusted hand to kiss, and invited them to dinner.



CHAPTER 34


He found a new Edith Cortright, a surprisingly vigorous and outdoor Edith, once she was away from Venetian proprieties. She gave up soft black
for a linen sailor-blouse and a shocking skirt; she showed a talent for swimming, sailing, tennis, and managing the house. The Ercole estate,
with its half a dozen villas, was like a private village, and a hectic village life it was into which Sam had come. The smiling Italian servants
walked without warning into any room, at any time--embarrassed him by bouncing into his bedroom when he was shaving, cheerfully conducted the
fish-pedler into the drawing-room at tea-time, and at all hours, under all windows, squabbled and laughed and gabbled and made love and sang. And
there were so many of them belonging to the various villas. Sam was always discovering some new cottage--half-dug in the cliffs, or atop a coach
house, or mysteriously under it with its door opening on another level--filled with gardeners or gatekeepers or maids, with their children, their
goats, their puppies, their rabbits, and long-faced Italian cats.

The Baron and Baroness Ercole and their friends--officers who came out from the barracks, navy officers, young professors from the university--
were as gay and welcoming as any American country club set priding itself on hospitality. They played tennis, they organized dances, they motored
(at appalling speed) to festivals in distant mountain villages, and in everything they made Edith and Sam a part of their own. Half of them did
not speak English, but their smiles recognized him as an old friend.

Alone, Edith and Sam explored Capri and Sorrento and Pompeii; were drawn up to the terror and fumes of Vesuvius; crept through the back alleys of
old Naples, where one street is given up to fish, one to vegetables, one to the most cheerfully lugubrious artificial funeral wreaths and to
votive pictures depicting the escape of pious persons from shipwreck, runaway horses, and falling bricks through the intervention of the saints.

Fran, who insisted that she "despised sight-seeing," had yet been so ejaculatory, so insistent that he should realize to the full whatever most
struck her, that he had had to work hard at travel, and had been conscious only of collecting unrelated impressions. Edith was lazily indifferent
to his liking things. With her, he let his mind loaf, and slowly some sense of the real Italy came to him, some feeling that it was not a
picturesque show but a normal and eager life.

They came home, dusty from Naples, for tea in the dim huge room looking on the bay. The late-afternoon glow over the piled hill of Naples faded
to misty blue. The last high light in the scene was the smoke of Vesuvius, a fabulous flamingo hue in the vanishing sunlight. As the bay turned
to a blue fabric woven with silver threads, the lights of braziers came out cheerfully in the little fishing boats. And in the twilight hush,
Edith's voice was quiet, not pricking him with demands for admiration of her cleverness, her singular charms, but assuring him (though actually
she talked only of the Ercoles, perhaps, or politics, or antipasto) that she was happy to be with him, that she took strength from him by giving
him strength.

He assumed that he was strong and primitive as the west wind, that she was sophisticated and fragile, utterly a creature of indoors, and he was
the more startled on the day when they rested on the stone wall by the orange grove. It was an ancient, crumbly, slatternly stone wall, lizards
darting from the crevices, moss and tiny weeds like a velvet cushion along the top. Below, in the hollow, was a tile and plaster house of three
irregular flat-roofed and terraced stories, apparently not connected, entered by doorways above crazy stone flights of steps, all curiously like
a New Mexican pueblo. The grove climbed from the hollow to the highway above--orange trees, lemons, a palmetto or two, with vines stretched upon
the elongated branches of mulberry trees. Where a group of boulders intruded on the slope, the earth between rocks had been painfully turned into
tiny vineyards, a yard or two square, protected by little stone walls. The grove suggested centuries of minute and patient labor, yet it was
disorderly, the ground rough and littered, the trees a tangle, with no straight lines.

"You wondered," said Edith, perched on the wall, "whether I could stand a canoe trip, sleeping on the ground. What do you think of this orchard?"

"Don't quite see the connection."

"What do you think of it? How does it strike you--as an efficient person?"

"Well, the fruit looks all right, but it seems kind of higgledy-piggledy. And it's darned hot, here on this wall!"

"Exactly! Well, the Italian peasant loves the heat, and he loves just the bare ridged ground--the earth, earthy earth! He loves earth and sun and
wind and rain. He's a mystic, in the highest sense of that badly escorted word. The European is the same everywhere, in that. The Tyrolese love
the sharp smell of the glaciers, the ragged mountain-slopes that almost frighten me, so that they die of homesickness abroad. The Prussian loves
that thick sandy waste and the bleak little pines. The French villager doesn't mind the reality of manure piles and mud puddles in front of his
house. The English farmer loves his bare downs with their sharp little furze bushes. They love earth and wind and rain and sun. And I've learned
it from them. You wonder if I could 'stand' sleeping on the ground! I'd love it so much more than you! I'm so much more elementary. Here, we may
have ruins and painting, but behind them we're so much closer to the eternal elements than you Americans. You don't love earth, you don't love
the wind--"

"Oh, look here now! What about our millions of acres of plowed fields? Nothing LIKE it, outside of maybe Russia! What about our most important
men, that get out in the fresh air and motor and golf--"

"No. Your farmers want to get away from their wash of acres to the city. Your business men drive out to the golf club in closed sedans, and they
don't want just bare earth--they want the earth of the golf course all neatly concealed by lawn. And I--you think of me as sitting in drawing-
rooms, but here you've seen me reveling in sea water and running on the beach. And often and often when you think I'm napping in my room, I sneak
out to that little bit of walled-off garden just above the house and lie there in the hot sun, in the wind, smelling of the reeking earth,
finding life! That's the strength of Europe--not its so-called 'culture,' its galleries and neat voices and knowledge of languages, but its
nearness to earth. And that's the weakness of America--not its noisiness and its cruelty and its cinema vulgarity but the way in which it erects
steel-and-glass skyscrapers and miraculous cement-and-glass factories and tiled kitchens and wireless antennae and popular magazines to insulate
it from the good vulgarity of earth!"



He wondered about it. He admitted that he had seen only an indoor Europe. With hotel lounges, restaurants, bedrooms, train coupes, even galleries
and cathedrals and a few authentic homes, he was familiar enough. But he realized that he had but little sense of the smell of earth in the
changing countries. He could remember St. Stefan's Kirche in Vienna, but he could not remember the colors of the Austrian Alps, the sound of
mountain streams, the changing smell of the crowded and musty pines at dawn, at noon, and in the dusk. He had talked with Spanish waiters but he
had not been silent with Spanish peasants.

Perhaps, as she said, it was he who was the decadent and ephemeral flower of an imperiled civilization and she who was the root, not to be
killed; he saw that she had more essential lustiness than he, more endurance than the lively but glass-encased Fran, vigorous enough in joy but
wilting and whimpering under trials. The Ercoles, Kurt von Obersdorf, Lord Herndon, they were not to be crushed. In humility he turned to the
eternal earth, and in the earth he found contentment. He had daily less need to "buzz out and look at things," as Fran put it. He sat for hours
with Edith, or alone by the bay, staring at the miraculously involved branches of a cypress, discovering the myriad minute skyscrapers in a patch
of moss. And he began to desire to have--with Edith--a farm at home, and not a gentleman's showplace, to increase social credit, but an authentic
farm, smelling of horses and cattle and chickens, with cornfields baking at noon, mysterious in their jungle-like alleys. This simple-hearted
ambition stirred him more, gave him more feeling that he had something secret and exciting to live for, than any of the business plans which were
rousing him again to self-respect. . . . But it must be with Edith. . . . He smiled a little to think of himself, this bucolic lump, drawn back
to earth by her thin unearthen hands. Edith! He understood better the slim starry Virgins before whom sun-black peasants bowed in Italian
chapels.



He asked himself, then, "Am I in love with Edith--whatever this 'being in love' means?"

He had never so much as kissed her; only three or four times had he even patted her hand. He felt, sometimes, that behind her reticence there
could be an honest passion, uncramped by the desire to make an impression, but he drifted on in a curious contented languor, willing to wait for
exaltation. He found that when she was away, he missed her--had every moment some idea or observation he desired to share with her. But that was
to him a lesser hint of what Edith Cortright had done to him than his increase in self-confidence.

It took him a time to perceive that perhaps he really was accepted by Edith, by the Ercoles and the various Captain Counts and Professores
Dottores whom the Ercoles knew, as something more than the provincial, insensitive, Midwestern manufacturer whom Fran had pitied. Baron Ercole
did not explain with bored patience when Sam asked elementary questions about Fascismo. Edith was not tart with him when he grumbled that he did
not like the Narcissus in the Naples Museum.

They did not expect him to be an authority on sculpture, Chianti, Roman history, or the ranks of Italian nobility. Apparently they not only
expected him to be precisely what he was, but admired him for it. He was at first embarrassed, made rather suspicious, by the Baroness Ercole's
admiration of him as a strong oarsman, a kindly companion, a frank talker, a sound financier, but day by day he saw that she meant it. In this
most Italian Italy he might without apology still be a most American American. Light seemed to be woven into the very texture of his face that
these months past had been heavy and lifeless and unhealthily flushed; and his eyes flickered as of old they had in talk with his daughter Emily.

"You are real," they all said, in one way or another, and "I AM real!" he began to gloat.

He slept tranquilly, conscious in his sleep of the security of Edith's presence on the floor below, shielding him against terror. He did not
awake now at three, for a cigarette and brooding about Fran.

But once, late at night, he thought that he heard Fran calling, a sharp, beseeching "Sam--oh, SAM!" and he sprang up, stood swaying, bewildered
as he realized that she was not with him, probably never would be again.

And the time, which he forgot as soon as possible, when Edith came into the room when he was writing and he raised his head, smiling, with "my
Fran!"

Edith's only effort to correct his provincial ways was in a gentle urging, "Let yourself enjoy life, Sam! You're typically American in being
burdened with a sense of guilt, no matter what you do or you don't do."

This may conceivably have had some connection with the fact that when he appeared with Edith, when they went to dinner with one of the Ercoles'
friends or to the Excelsior for tea, more people looked interestedly at him, standing casually beside her, than in the days when he had been
anxious to make an impression for Fran's sake. He no longer minded meeting strangers or having to listen to their foreign accents. He took them
as they came.

He awoke one morning to lie looking at the bay and to realize that he was definitely and positively happy.



He had written to Fran a good deal about Edith. Fran was polite in her comments; she sent her greetings to "Mrs. Cortright"; and she was still
politer, almost effusively jolly, when she wrote to him from Berlin that she was at last suing for divorce. With the term of residence she
already had, the process would take three months. She was very pleasant about the fact that the grounds would be desertion, and the affair free
of scandal.

He remembered how excited they had been when they had gone to Chicago together and he had bought her first little string of pearls; how proud she
had been of them, and how grateful. . . . Then he felt curiously free.



When he reluctantly brought this decisive letter to Edith, she read it slowly, and ventured, "Do you mind awfully?"

"Oh yes, a little."

"But it does clear things up, doesn't it! And--I hope it won't break your beautiful new calm!"

"I won't let it!"

"But I've seen you so badgered by her letters!"

"Yes, but--I say! Could you ever possibly consider going to a place like Zenith to live?"

"Of course. Do places differ so much?"

"Would it amuse you to work on a plan like these garden suburbs?"

"I don't know. It might."

It was an hour afterward, when they had pretended to keep placidly busy with books and writing letters, that Edith burst out:

"Sam! About your suburbs. Something could be done--not just Italian villas and Swiss chalets--for a town with a tradition of Vermont Yankees and
Virginians in buckskin. Why shouldn't one help to create an authentic and unique American domestic architecture? Our skyscrapers are the first
really new thing in architecture since the Gothic cathedral, and perhaps just as beautiful! Create something native--and not be afraid to keep in
all the plumbing and vacuum-cleaners and electric dish-washers! Dismiss the imitation chateaux. The trouble with the rich American is that he
feels uncouth and untraditional, and so he meekly trots to Europe to buy sun-dials and Fifteenth Century mantelpieces and refectory tables--to
try to buy aristocracy by buying the aristocrats' worn-out coats. I like my Europe in Europe; at home I'd like to watch people make something
new. For example, your motor cars."

"Then you would like a place like Zenith, that's growing?"

"How can I tell? I'd certainly like the adventure of trying it."

He felt that her hesitation was more promising than the enthusiasms of Fran. Suddenly a horde of Ercoles were trouping in, planning a swim, and
no more that day, nor the next, did they speak of Fran, of Zenith, of themselves. But when they said good night, he kissed her hands, and her
eyes dwelt upon him.



They were dining at Bertolini's, high above Naples, looking out toward Capri, and he was talking of possible schemes: a two-story caravan with a
canvas-sided collapsible upper floor, so that the caravan could pass under arches en route; a caravan that could turn into a house boat, carrying
its own hull along, collapsed; a summer resort entirely for children whose parents were going abroad; a dozen fantastic, probably practical
plans. She was amused by them, suggested improvements, and Sam was lustily content.

But after his second cognac the orchestra played selections from the Viennese operettas which Fran loved, and he remembered how happy he had been
with Fran in Berlin, at first. It came to him that if Kurt failed to marry her, she would be a bewildered and lonely exile; and through the
music, through the darkness beyond the music, he saw her fleeing, a desolate wraith; and while Edith gossiped most amiably, Sam's heart was heavy
with pity for the frightened and bewildered child Fran, who once had laughed so eagerly with him.

But, back at the Villa Ercole, he stood with Edith on the terrace and across the whispering darkness of the bay, he saw the cone of Vesuvius with
a thin line of fire.

"Don't worry it too much!" said Edith suddenly, and he was grateful that she understood his cloudy thoughts without making him wrap them in
cloudier words.



CHAPTER 35


For days they drifted in perfect calm, and he was proud that the enervating thought of Fran was gone from him.

All one morning they explored the ridge above Posilipo, found fragments of a Roman emperor's villa and the carp-pond in which he used to drown
his slaves as the best fish-food, and discovered the mausoleum which, history asserts, was the tomb of Vergil, or of some one else. They
straggled home, up the long street which was a wilderness of children and carts, and sank down sighing in the cool drawing-room.

"Collatzione, Teresa," he ordered, then: "Curious, Edith, but this house that you've rented, and that belongs to an Italian I never saw till the
other day, is the first that I ever felt was really mine. I actually dare give an order!"

"But I'm sure your Fran never MEANT to be a domestic dictator. . . ."

The gardener had left the mail on the table, but Sam did not pick it up till after lunch, and then but carelessly. On top was a letter from Fran.
He pretended, not very skillfully, that he had to go to his room, and he read Fran's letter alone:


I haven't much excuse, probably I've been a fool and not appreciated you but anyway, maybe with no right to, I am turning to you rather
desperately. Kurt's mother finally came up from Austria. She was pretty rude to me. She indicated, oh quite clearly that for the Catholic and
Highly Noble Kurtrl to marry a female who was (or soon would be) heinously divorced, who was an American, and who was too old to bear him heirs,
would be disastrous. And she didn't spare me very much in putting it that way, either. Not a pretty scene--me sitting there smoking in Kurt's
flat and trying to look agreeable while she wailed at Kurt and ignored me. And Kurt stood by her. Oh, his nice little sentimental heart bled for
me, and since then he's such a good time being devastated and trying to take both sides at once. But he "thought ve had better put off the
marriage for maybe a couple of years till ve von her over." God! Is he a man or a son? There ain't going to be no vinning over, and no marriage!
I'm sick of his cowardice, when I risked so much, but why go into that.

If you still care to bend your Olympian head and forgive the probably wicked and unforgivable Magdalene or however it's spelled, I should be glad
to join you again, anyway I've stopped divorce proceedings. Of course I realize that in saying this so honestly, without efforts to protect
myself as most women would, I risk another humiliation at your hands such as I had from Kurt. Of course I don't know how far you have committed
yourself in the rather strange relations with this Mrs. Cortwright in which you have apparently had so much pleasure and relief from my
aggravating self, though how you could be willing to take snubs from the highly proper Italians by thus living with her openly instead of
concealing things is beyond--

Oh forgive me, forgive me, dear Sambo darling, forgive me, your bad child Fran! I sound so beastly and snotty when in my heart I'm desolated and
scared and lost and I turn to you as the Rock of Ages! I wrote so abominably and unjustly because I'm so wretched, so desperate, and I won't even
tear it up--I want you to know that if you do let your bad Fran come back, she probably hasn't learned as much as she should in her mediocre
little tragedy, she'll probably be just as snobbish and demanding as ever, though God knows I don't want to be, I am so tired of thread-bare
grandeurs now and want so much to be simple and honest.

I think you will credit me with not trying to come back just because you are rich and strong, and Kurt poor and honest. It's just--Oh, you know
what it is! I venture to turn to you because I do know that once, anyway, you loved me a great deal. And if we could manage to stick together, it
will be so much better for Brent and Emily--oh, I know, probably it's shameless of me to speak of that so late, but it is true.

I find there is a boat leaving Hamburg September 19, Cherbourg the next day, the Deutschland and if you CARE to join me on it, or meet me in
Paris, I should be--Oh Sam, if you still do love me, you mustn't be proud, you mustn't take this chance to punish me, but come, because
otherwise--Oh, I don't know what I WILL do! I've been so proud! Now I feel the world is jeering at me! I don't dare leave my flat, don't dare
answer the phone and hear their pitying laughter, I have my maid answer it for me, and usually it is still Kurt, but I'll never see him again,
never, he talks of killing himself but he won't--his Mamma wouldn't let him!

As soon as you get this, won't you please telephone me here, from Naples.

If you feel like coming, I hope this will not inconvenience your hostess, Mrs. Cortright, whom I remember so agreeably in Venice, kindly give her
my regards. But I hope that my appeal may be somewhat more important to you than even your social duty to that doubtless most charming lady who
is I am sure much less irritating than I.


Her whole handwriting changed then; he felt that the rest of the letter had been written hours later:


Oh, Sam, I do need you so, did I ever tell you that I adore you?

Your shamed and wretched little Fran.


He blundered down to the drawing-room, snorting, "Got to run into Naples. May be late for tea. Don't wait."

"What is it?"

"Oh, it's nothing."

He fled from her.

All the way down, on the tram, he asked himself whether he wanted to have Fran again, and whether he was really going to join her, and to both he
answered with perfect blankness. But when he asked whether he wanted to leave Edith, he denied it, sharply, with fury, reflecting wretchedly how
good she had been, how honest, how understanding, and perceiving there was rising in him a passion for her greater than the mystic vexation with
which Fran had fascinated him.

And he was going to desert Edith, going to be weak enough to betray her?

"Oh, probably," he sighed, when for an hour, at the American Express Company, he had been waiting for the telephone call to Berlin.

He seemed to wait forever.

He was as conscious of the scene in the express office as though he had sat there for years. A picture of a big New York Central locomotive.
Racks of pamphlets about spicy places--Burma and Bangkok and Sao Paulo--he would never see them now, because Fran would find them crude and
unfashionable. A tourist lady writing letters and between sentences boasting to her mother of the WON-DERFUL corals she had found on the Piazza
dei Martiri--

Then startlingly, "Your Berlin call!"



He heard Fran's voice, quicksilver voice, eagerness of the wildly playing child in its lifting mutations:

"Oh, Sam, it really is you? You really are coming, dearest? You do forgive poor Fran?"

"Sure. Be on the boat. ON THE BOAT. Yes, the nineteenth, yes, sure, we'll talk over everything, good-bye, honey, you better get the tickets as
you're there in Germany. GET THE STEAMER TICKETS, good-bye, honey, I'll wire you a confirmation."



He walked back most of the way, looking old and slow and sweaty, laboring over the coming scene with Edith. She would be very polite but
surprised, contemptuous of him for returning to the servitude of Fran's witchery.

He slunk in a few minutes after six.

She was reading by the great window in the drawing-room. She glanced up, then, wondering, "What is it? What's happened?"

"Well--"

He stood by the window, making much of clipping and lighting a cigar, and he did not look at her as he grumbled, "Fran's lover, this Count
Obersdorf, has turned her down. His mother thought she was kind of declasse--divorce and all that. Poor kid, that must've been hard on her. She's
given up the idea of divorce, and she's sailing for home. She'll be kind of--Oh, people'hl talk a lot, I guess. I'm afraid I'll have to go with
her. Fact, I'll have to catch the midnight for Rome, tonight. . . . I wish there were some way of telling you all that you've--"

"Sam!"

She had sprung up. He was astonished by the fury in her quiet eyes.

"I won't let you go back to that woman! And I won't see you killed--yes, killed!--by her sweet, gay, well-mannered, utter damned selfishness! Her
only thought about anybody is what they give her! The world offers you sun and wind, and Fran offers you death, fear and death! Oh, I'd seen how
you've aged five years in five minutes, after one of her complaining letters! And you won't be helping her--you'll just make her feel all the
more that she can do any selfish, cruel thing she wants to and come out of it unscathed! Think of Peking and Cairo! No! Think of the farm you
could have in Michigan, among the pines! Think of how natural and contented you'd be--yes, WE'D be--back there--"

"I know, Edith; I know every bit of it. I just can't help it. She's my child. I've got to take care of her."

"Yes. Well." The passion did not fade from her eyes, but snapped out, as though one should turn off a light, and she said dully, "Sorry. I was
impertinent. At least let me help you pack."

Throughout the packing, dinner, and the rather dreadful waiting afterward, when he could not find two civil words to put together, she was a
little abrupt of speech, very courteous. She asked questions about Zenith. She politely hoped that she might see him "and Mrs. Dodsworth" some
distant day. Only once was she near to intimacy, when, after a torturing pause, she blurted, "There really isn't much to say, is there! But I do
want you to know that because you've seemed to like me, you've given me a new assurance."

When he tried to counter with florid compliments, she bustled out to the kitchen.

The sound of the coming taxicab released him from the eternity of sitting dead in a tomb. While the servants straggled out with his luggage, he
held her hand, patting it.

"It is all ready, Signore," said the maid. She received the highly expected tip, and with a "Com' beck soon!" which sounded sincere, she
vanished.

In the twilight outside the tree-shadowed door, he awkwardly shook hands with Edith, but while he was trying to say something agreeable, she
cried:

"It's too late now. But I thought that some day--I thought it would be easy for me to talk, and I would tell you all sorts of things about how I
feel and think. That it's been pleasant to be with you. That you're bigger than you know, not smaller, like celebrities. That you've made me
willing to stop being afraid of the world, and to attack it again. I've felt--" She seized his rough sleeve. "That curious feeling, always a
surprise every time I was with you, of 'Why, it's you!' That feeling that you were different from any other living person--not necessarily one
bit finer but--oh, different! I shouldn't say any of this, but before it's quite too late--too late!--I want to try to be reckless. But I can't
say any of the things I thought. Bless you, my dear! And God keep you through the wickedness of this Happy Ending!"

He kissed her, a terrible clinging kiss, and lumbered over to the roadway and his taxicab. He looked back. She seemed to start toward him, then
closed the door quickly. Through a window he heard her voice, weary and spiritless: "Only one for breakfast, Teresa."

He was alone with a yawning taxi-driver, as a breeze came up from the bay in the Southern darkness.



CHAPTER 36


Fran was lovely, very young, in a gray-squirrel mantle.

"I got it for almost NOTHING, at the summer sales in Berlin," she said. "Why is it most women never can seem to economize? I'll bet your
wonderful flame, Mrs. Cost--Cortright? funny, I never CAN seem to remember her name--she's frightfully clever, I'm sure, but I'll bet she'd have
paid twice as much for it."

The late September was cold even for mid-Atlantic. Fran smoothed the fur, draped it closer in her steamer-chair. She seemed to him like a leopard
with its taut limbs hidden by a robe.

Now, after tea hour on the S.S. Deutschland, a raging sunset smeared the waves with a frightening crimson. They smelled a storm. The ship ducked
before the attacking waves. But Fran was full of liveliness and well-being. As she talked, she nodded every instant to people they had met
aboard, the men who were always in a knot about her at the dances, the matrons who talked of "that charming Mrs. Dodsworth--she told me she was
much younger than her husband--he's a little slow, don't you think--but she's so fond of him--looks after him like a daughter."

Fran cuddled down in her richness of fur.

"Oh, it's nice to be GOING somewhere!" she said. "I bet we'll both be crazy to start off somewhere, maybe back to Paris, when we've been home a
few months. (What an ATROCIOUS hat that woman has on and my DEAR, will you regard her shoes! Why they ALLOW people like that in the first cabin?)
And you can't know how tired I got of sticking around Berlin forever 'n' ever! Oh, you were so right about Kurt, Sam dear. I don't know how you
guessed it! You'd be the first to admit you aren't usually so AWFULLY good at judging character, except in the case of business men, but you were
right with--Oh, he was so BOSSY! He was furious if I so much as suggested I'd like to run down to Baden-Baden by myself. And where he got the
idea that he was so important--Oh, his family may be as old as the Coliseum--the Coliseo--but when I saw his mother, my DEAR, the most awful old
country frump--"

"Don't!" said Sam. "Don't know why, but I kind of hate to hear you riding Kurt and his mother that way. They were probably hurt, too."

Most graciously, quite forgivingly, "Yes, you're right. Sorry, M'sieu! I'll be a good girl. And of course everything is all right now. After all,
it's such a wonderful Happy Ending to our wild little escapades! We've both learned lots, don't you think? and now I won't be so flighty and you
won't be so irritable, I'm sure you won't."

There was dancing in the verandah cafe. Young Tom Allen, the polo player--young Tom, all black and ivory and grin--came to ask her to dance. She
smiled up at him, airily patted Sam's arm, and scampered away, while Tom seemed to be holding her hand under shelter of her squirrel robe.

The sunset was angry now, the color of port wine.

Sam staggered around and around the slanting deck, alone, and alone he stood aft, looking back in the direction of Europe. But there was only
foggy gray.



He awoke, bewildered, at two in the morning. The storm had come; the steamer was pitching abominably. In his half sleep he heard Edith whimpering
in her sleep in the twin bed beside him. Smiling, glad to comfort her who had been all comfort to him here in sun-bright Naples, he stretched out
his arm, sleepily stroked her thin wrist.

He startled, he sat up and gasped, at the astonishment of hearing the voice of Fran.

"Oh, thank you! Nice of you to wake me up. Having a kind of nightmare. My, it's rough!"

In his agitation he tightened his fingers on her wrist.

"Oh, Sam, DON'T--Oh, don't be ARDENT! Not yet. I must get used--And I'm so sleepy!" Very brightly: "You don't mind, do you? Nighty-night!"

He lay awake. In the watery light from the transom he saw the sheen of her silver toilet things on the dresser. He thought of this tremendous
steamer, pounding the waves. He thought of the modern miracle of the radio, up above, of the automatic electric steering apparatus. Yet on the
bridge were sailors, unautomatic, human, eternal. The ship, too, was eternal, as a vehicle of man's old voyaging. Its creaking seemed to him like
the creaking of an ancient Greek trireme.

But while his thoughts reached out thus for things heroic, he heard her placid breathing and he smelled not the sea gale but perfume that came
from little crystal vials among her silver toilet-things that were vaster than the hull of the steamer, stronger than the storm.

He felt that he would never sleep again.

He closed his great fist, tight. Then it relaxed, and he was asleep.



He roused to hear her bubbling, in a stormy dawn:

"Are you awake? Don't let me disturb you. Horrid morning! Let's get up some bridge. We'll get Mr. Ballard and Tom Allen. He's a dear boy, isn't
he! Though I feel like a mother toward him. Oh, Sam, if you aren't too sleepy--Oh. While we're in New York, I think I'll see if I can't pick up a
really nice Chinese evening wrap. Tom told me about a shop. Of course I have those others, but they're getting so shabby, and after all, you
don't expect me to look a fright, like Matey Pearson, do you! I'll make her eyes start out of her head with the Marcel Rochas frock I got in
Paris, and think, I only had two days to get it in! Zenith will simply foam at the mouth! Oh, after all, it IS kind of nice to be going home--for
a while--after all we've gone through--and Sam, I wonder if you understand that _I_ understand probably you were just as brave and honest as I
was, even with the hideous suffering I had to face in Berlin! And--Oh, I don't know what reminded me of it, but you must be careful with the
Ballards. I'm afraid you bored them last evening, talking about Italian motors. You must remember that they have a villa in Florence, and they're
used to the real Italy, and artists and the nobility and so on. But of course it doesn't matter. And--Do you mind ringing for coffee? That's an
old dear!"

The scent of her perfumes seemed stronger than by night, in the sleep-thickened air of the stateroom.

He slowly raised himself to ring for the steward. He had said nothing whatever.

She blissfully dropped off to sleep again, and he bathed, dressed, swayed out on deck. The open portion of the promenade dock was protected by
canvas against which the water crashed, sending streams between the lashings to trickle along the deck. He labored forward, stood solemnly at a
window looking ahead at the bow plunging into the waves, at the foam hurled over the forepeak, at a desolate immigrant in a tattered old raincoat
trying to keep a footing on the forward deck.

It was black ahead. To a landsman it was menacing. Yet there was strength in the stormy air and, after a long breath, stretching out his great
arms, Sam began to plow around the deck.

His eyes seemed turned inward; his lips moved a little in his meditation.

After half an hour, breakfastless, he suddenly climbed the stairs from A Deck to the Boat Deck and, down a narrow corridor, past the tiny
florist-shop, came to the wireless bureau--a narrow desk across a small room, like a telegraph office in a minor hotel.

Emotionlessly, he wrote and handed in a message to Edith Cortright: "Will you be Naples three weeks from now?"

He went down to breakfast. All morning and half the afternoon he played bridge, watching Fran flirt with the ebullient Tom Allen.

The answer to his radio came just before tea-time: "No but shall be venice for couple months bless you edith."

For an hour, while Fran made much of tea with half a dozen men, Sam sat alone in the smoking-room, pretending to read whenever any lone and
necessitous drinker came in to look for a drinking companion.

At the dressing-hour, he said mildly to Fran, "I wonder if we mightn't have dinner here in our stateroom tonight? I want to talk about things.
We've sort of avoided it."

"Good Heavens, Sambo, what's come over you? Do you regard it as particularly cheerful to dine in this beastly little hole of a room on a rough
night like this? Besides! I promised the Ballards we'd join them in the grill for dinner--such a common, stupid commercial crowd in the salon."

"But we must talk."

"My dear man, I think we'll manage it, with four full days ahead of us on this steamer! I'm really not going off to the Riviera or any place, you
know!"

It was not till late in the evening that he had his chance. As they came down to the stateroom at bedtime, Fran very lively after a session in
the smoking-room, he said, without prelude:

"Not much use trying to do it tactfully. Wanted to, but Fran, we can't make a go of it, and I'm going back and join Edith Cortright."

"I don't quite understand. What have I done now? Oh, my God, if you haven't learned--You haven't learned anything, not one single thing, out of
all our sorrows! Still criticizing me, and such a kind sweet way of springing something beastly cruel on me just when I've been happy, as I have
tonight!" She faced him, hands clenched. "Will you KINDLY, Mr. Dodsworth, be a little less mysterious and tell me just what it is I've done to
hurt your tender little feelings THIS time?"

"Nothing. We just can't make a go of it. You don't get me. I'm not making a scene. I'm not trying to bully you. I meant just what I said. I'm
going back to Italy, from New York, on the first ship. I'm not blaming or criticizing--"

She sat abruptly on the chair before her dressing-table. She said quietly, with fear edging her voice, "And what is to become of me?"

"I don't know. If I did, I wouldn't have met you on the ship."

She moaned. "Oh! You do manage to hurt! I congratulate you! You see, I've been flattering myself you really wanted to come back to me!"

He started to say something comforting, then held it back in panic, as if in danger. "I'm not going to be polite, Fran. You know how awfully I've
loved you, a good many years. You tampered with it. . . . What's going to become of you? I don't know. But I guess it'll be just the same thing
that's been becoming of you this past couple of years. You haven't needed me. You've found people to play with, and plenty of beaux. I suppose
you'll go on finding them--"

"And this is the man that 'loved me awfully'--"

"Wait! For the first time in all our arguments, I'm going to think of what would become of ME! I can't help you. I'm just your attendant. But me-
-you can kill me. I didn't used to mind your embarrassing me and continually putting me in my place. Didn't even know you were doing it. But I do
now, and I won't stand it!"

"Was it your dear Mrs. Cortright who taught you that lovely theory? about embarrassing you? After the years when I've never allowed one single
soul to criticize you--"

"Understand? I'm FINISHED!"

He did not, unfortunately, leave her in any heroic and dignified way. He flounced out of the stateroom like a child in a tantrum. And that was
because he knew that only by childish violence could he escape from her logic, and because he knew that he must escape, even over the side of the
lurching ship. For she was indeed perfectly logical and sound. She knew what she wanted!



It was misery for him to look out at her from the taxicab which he was taking to the Italian Line dock, after three days in New York; to see her
standing in front of the hotel, alone, deserted, her eyes pitiful, and to realize that he might never see her again. The look in her eyes had
been the meaning of life for him, and he was deserting it.



They were dining at the Ritz in Paris, Edith and Sam, feeling superior to its pretentiousness, because that evening they had determined to return
to America, when his divorce should be complete, and to experiment with caravans. They were gay, well dined and well content.

But after his second cognac the orchestra played selections from Viennese operettas, and he remembered how happy Fran and he had been in Berlin.
He remembered the wretchedness of the letter he had received from her that day. She was staying with Emily in Zenith; she said that she was
seeing no one; that his "DEAR friends Tub and Matey" were a little too polite; and that she was thinking of going, in a few days, to Italy--

Through the darkness beyond the music, he saw her fleeing, a desolate wraith, and his heart was heavy with pity for the frightened and bewildered
child who once had laughed so eagerly with him.

He came out of his silence with a consciousness that Edith was watching him. She said lightly, "You enjoy being sad about her! But hereafter,
every time there is a music, I shall also think of Cecil Cortright. How handsome he was! He spoke five languages! How impatient I was with him!
How I failed him! How virtuous it makes me feel to flay myself! What a splendid, uncommon grief I have! Dear Sam! . . . What a job it is to give
up the superiority of being miserable and self-sacrificing!"

He stared, he pondered, he suddenly laughed, and in that laughter found a youthfulness he had never known in his solemn youth.

He was, indeed, so confidently happy that he completely forgot Fran and he did not again yearn over her, for almost two days.

THE END


End of this Meredy.com E-book Dodsworth by Sinclair Lewis
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Listen to the October 4, 1937 Lux Radio Theater version of Dodsworth starring Walter Huston, Nan Sunderland, Barbara O'Neil, and Pedro De Cordoba.



Listen to the November 26, 1939 Campbell Playhouse version of Dodsworth starring Orson Welles, Fay Bainter, and Nan Sunderland.