Ive Married Marjorie | Page 5

who sent buoyantly across and demanded such tunes as he
was fondest of. There was one which they played to which he sang,
under his breath, a profane song which ran in part:
"And we'll all come home And get drunk on ginger pop-- For the
slackers voted the country dry While we went over the top."
And then, when the meal was two-thirds over, Marjorie wished she

hadn't offered up any prayers for help to get through the situation.
Because softly up to their table strolled a tall, thin young man with a
cane, gray silk gloves, and a dreamy if slightly nervous look, and said
discontentedly, "Marjorie Ellison! How wonderful to find you here!
You will let me sit down at your table, won't you, and meet your
soldier-friend?"
If Marjorie had never written to Francis about Bradley Logan it would
have been all right, quite a rescue, in fact. But in those too fatally
discursive letters; the letters which had come finally to feel like a
sympathetic diary with no destination, she had rather enlarged on him.
He had been admiring her at disconnected intervals ever since she first
met him. He had not been able to get in the army because of some
mysterious neurasthenic ailment about which he preserved a hurt
silence, as to details, but mentioned a good deal in a general way. It
kept him from making engagements, it made him unable to go long
distances; Marjorie had described all the scattered hints about it in her
letters to Francis, who had promptly written back that undoubtedly the
little friend had fits; and referred to him thereafter, quite without malice,
as, "your fit-friend." She had an insane terror, as she introduced him,
lest she should explain him to Francis in an audible aside by that name.
However, it was unnecessary. Francis placed him immediately, it was
to be seen, and was cold almost to rudeness. Logan did not notice it
much. He sat down with them, declined the food Marjorie offered,
ordered himself three slivers of dry toast and a cup of lemonless and
creamless tea, and sipped them and nibbled them as if even they were a
concession to manners.
What really was the matter with Logan Marjorie was doomed never to
know. Francis told her afterwards, with a certain marital brevity, that it
was a combination of dry toast and thinking too much about French
poets. His literary affiliations, which he earned his living by, had
stopped short at the naughty nineties, when everybody was very
unhealthy and soulful and hinted darkly at tragedies; the period of the
Yellow Book and Aubrey Beardsley and Arthur Symons and Dowson,
and the last end of Wilde. He undoubtedly had the charming and fluent
manners of his time, anachronism though he was. And he talked a great

deal, and very brilliantly, if a bit excitedly. He plunged now, in his
charming, high, slightly too mannered voice, into a discussion with
Marjorie on the absolute rottenness of the modern magazine,
considered from the viewpoint of style. He overwhelmed them with
instances of how all magazines were owned by persons who neither had
cultivation nor desired any. Francis answered him very little, so
Marjorie, wifely before her time, found herself trying nervously to keep
up with Logan, and hurling more thoughts at him about Baudelaire than
she had known she possessed. As a matter of fact she'd never read any
of him, but Logan thought she had to his dying day, which says a good
deal for her brains. Presently Francis summoned the waiter in rather a
martial voice, demanded a taxi of him efficiently, and Marjorie found
herself swept away from Logan and taxi-ing extravagantly uptown
before she knew what she was at.
Francis wasn't cross, it appeared. The first thing he did when he got her
in the cab was to sweep her close to him--the second to burst into a peal
of delighted laughter, and quote
"I had a cow, a gentle cow, who browsed beside my door, Did not think
much of Maeterlinck, and would not, furthermore!"
"Heavens!" he ended, "that fool and his magazine editors! Nobody but
you could have been so patient with the poor devil, Marge."
He leaned her and himself back in the cab, and stared contemplatively
out at New York going by. "And to think--and--to--think--that while
half of decent humanity has been doing what it's been doing to keep the
world from going to hell, that fool--that fool--has been sitting at home
nibbling toast and worrying about what is style! . . . I'll tell him! Style
is what I'll have when I get these clothes off, and some regular ones.
You'll have to help me pick 'em out, Marge. You'll find I've no end of
uses for a