Between Friends | Page 8

a common artist's model--"
"Not that way."
"Oh. Is she yours?"
"She isn't anybody's, I fancy. Therefore, let her alone, or I'll throw you

out of doors."
Quair said to Guilder after they had departed:
"Fancy old Drene playing about with that girl on a strictly pious basis!
He's doubtless dub enough to waste his time. But what's in it for her?"
"Perhaps a little unaccustomed masculine decency."
"Everybody is decent enough to her as far as I know."
"Including yourself?"
"Certainly, including myself," retorted Quair, adding naively: "Besides,
I knew any attempt at philandering would be time wasted."
"Yet you tried it," mused Guilder, entering his big touring car and
depositing a bundle of blue-prints and linen tracing paper at his own
ponderous feet. Quair followed him and spoke briefly to the chauffeur,
then:
"Tried nothing," he said. "A little chaff, that's all. When it comes to a
man like Jack Graylock going so far as to ask her to marry him, good
night, nurse! Nothing doing, even for me."
"Even for you," repeated Guilder in his moderate and always
modulated voice. "Well, if she's escaped you and Graylock, she's
beyond any danger from Drene, I fancy."
Quair smiled appreciatively, as though a delicate compliment had been
offered him. Several times on the way to call on Graylock he insisted
on stopping the car at as many celebrated cafes. Guilder patiently
awaited him in the car and each time Quair emerged from the cafe bar a
little more flushed and a trifle jauntier than when he had entered.
He was a man so perfectly attired and so scrupulously fastidious about
his person that Guilder often speculated as to just why Quair always
seemed to him a trifle soiled.

Now, looking him over as he climbed into the car, unusually red in the
face, breathing out the aroma of spirits through his little, pinched
nostrils, a faint sensation of disgust came over the senior member of the
firm as though the junior member were physically unclean.
"That's about ten drinks since luncheon," he remarked, as the car rolled
on down Fifth Avenue.
Quair, who usually grew disagreeably familiar when mellow, poked his
gloved thumb:
"You're a merry old cock, aren't you?" he inquired genially, "--like a
pig's wrist! If I hadn't the drinking of the entire firm to do, who'd ever
talk about Guilder and Quair, architects?"
It was common rumor that Quair did his brilliant work only when
"soused." And he never appeared to be perfectly sober, even when he
was.
Graylock received them in his office--a big, reckless-eyed, handsome
man, with Broad Street written all over him and "danger" etched in
every deepened line of his face.
"Well, how about that business of mine?" he inquired. "It's all right to
keep me waiting, of course, while you and Quair here match for
highballs at the Ritz."
"I had to see Drene--that's why we are late," explained Guilder. "We're
ready to go ahead and let your contracts for you--"
"Drene?" interrupted Graylock, looking straight at Guilder with a
curious and staring intensity. "Why drag Drene into an excuse?"
"Because we went to his studio," said Guilder. "Now about letting the
contracts--"
"Were you at Drene's studio?"
"Yes. He's doing the groups for the new opera for us."

Quair, watching Graylock, was seized with a malicious impulse:
"Neat little skirt he has up there--that White girl," he remarked, seating
himself on Graylock's polished table.
A dull flush stained Graylock's cheekbones, and his keen eyes turned
on Quair. The latter lighted a cigarette, expelled the smoke in two thin
streams from his abnormally narrow nostrils.
"Some skirt," he repeated. "And it looks as though old Drene had her
number--"
Guilder's level voice interrupted:
"The contracts are ready to be--"
But Graylock, not heeding, and perhaps not hearing, and looking all the
time at Quair, said slowly:
"Drene isn't that kind. . . . Is he?"
"Our kind, you mean?" inquired Quair, with a malice so buried under
flippancy that the deliberate effrontery passed for it with Graylock.
Which amused Quair for a moment, but the satisfaction was not
sufficient. He desired that Graylock should feel the gaff.
"Drene," he said, "is one of those fussers who jellify when hurled on
their necks--the kind that ask that kind of girl to marry them after she's
turned down everything else they suggest."
Graylock's square jaw tightened and his steady eyes seemed to grow
even paler; but Quair, as though perfectly unconscious of this man's
record with the wife of his closest friend, and of the rumors which
connected him so seriously with Cecile White, swung his leg
unconcernedly, where it dangled over the table's edge, and smiled
frankly and knowingly upon Graylock:
"There's always somebody to marry that sort of girl; all mush isn't on
the