Young Peoples Pride | Page 6

But I don't know, Ollie, honestly I don't, and that's that."
"You see," he begins again, "the other thing--Oh, Lord, it's so tangled up! But it's just this. It sounds--funny--probably--coming from me--and after France and all that--but I'm not going to--pretend to myself I'm in love with a girl--just because I may--want to get married--the way lots of people do. I can't. And I couldn't with a girl like Elinor anyway--she's too fine."
"She is rather fine," says Oliver appreciatively. "Selective reticence--all that."
"Well, don't you see? And a couple of times--I've been nearly sure. And then something comes and I'm not again--not the way I want to be. And then--Oh, if I were, it wouldn't be much--use--you know--"
"Why not?"
"Well, consider our relative positions--"
"Consider your grandmother's cat! She's a girl--you're a man. She's a lady--you're certainly a gentleman--though that sounds like Jane Austen. And--"
"And she's--well, she isn't the wealthiest young lady in the country, but the Pipers are rich, though they never go and splurge around about it. And I'm living on scholarships and borrowed money from the family--and even after I really start working I probably won't make enough to live on for two or three years at least. And you can't ask a girl like that--"
"Oh, Ted, this is the twentieth century! I'm not telling you to hang up your hat and live on your wife's private income--" "That's fortunate," from Ted, rather stubbornly and with a set jaw.
"But there's no reason on earth--if you both really loved each other and wanted to get married--why you couldn't let her pay her share for the first few years. You know darn well you're going to make money sometime--"
"Well--yes."
"Well, then. And Elinor's sporting. She isn't the kind that needs six butlers to live--she doesn't live that way now. That's just pride, Ted, thinking that--and a rather bum variety of pride when you come down to it. I hate these people who moan around and won't be happy unless they can do everything themselves--they're generally the kind that give their wives a charge account at Lucile's and ten dollars a year pocket money and go into blue fits whenever poor spouse runs fifty cents over her allowance."
Ted pauses, considering. Finally,
"No, Ollie--I don't think I'm quite that kind of a fool. And almost thou convincest me--and all that. But--well--that isn't the chief difficulty, after all."
"Well, what _is_?" from Oliver, annoyedly.
Ted hesitates, speaking slowly.
"Well--after the fact that I'm not sure--France," he says at last, and his mouth shuts after the word as if it never wanted to open again.
Oliver spreads both hands out hopelessly.
"Are you never going to get over that, you ass?"
"You didn't do the things I did," from Ted, rather difficultly. "If you had--"
"If I had I'd have been as sorry as you are, probably, that I'd knocked over the apple cart occasionally. But I wouldn't spend the rest of my life worrying about it and thinking I wasn't fit to go into decent society because of what happened to most of the A.E.F. Why you sound as if you'd committed the unpardonable sin. And it's nonsense."
"Well--thinking of Elinor--I'm not too darn sure I didn't," from Ted, dejectedly.
"That comes of being born in New England and that's all there is to it. Anyhow, it's over now, isn't it?"
"Not exactly--it comes back."
"Well, kick it every time it does."
"But you don't understand. That and--people like Elinor--" says Ted hopelessly.
"I do understand."
"You don't." And this time Ted's face has the look of a burned man.
"Well--" says Oliver, frankly puzzled. "Well, that's it. Oh, it doesn't matter. But if there was another war--"
"Oh, leave us poor people that are trying to write a couple of years before you dump us into heroes' graves by the Yang tse Kiang!"
"Another war--and bang! into the aviation." Ted muses, his face gone thin with tensity. "It could last as long as it liked for me, providing I got through before it did; you'd be living anyhow, living and somebody, and somebody who didn't give a plaintive hoot how things broke."
He sighs, and his face smooths back a little.
"Well, Lord, I've no real reason to kick, I suppose," he ends. "There are dozens of 'em like me--dozens and hundreds and thousands all over the shop. We had danger and all the physical pleasures and as much money as we wanted and the sense of command--all through the war. And then they come along and say 'it's all off, girls,' and you go back and settle down and play you've just come out of College in peace-times and maybe by the time you're forty you'll have a wife and an income if another scrap doesn't come along. And then when we find it isn't as easy to readjust as they think, they yammer around pop-eyed and say 'Oh, what wild young people--what naughty little