“So there I am,” he finished. “If I let her go, I lose one of the links in Dunbar's chain. If I keep her?”
“Can't Natalie talk to him? Sometimes a woman can get to the bottom of these things when a man can't. He might tell her all about it.”
“Possibly. But I think it unlikely Natalie would tell me.”
She leaned over and patted his hand impulsively.
“What devils we women are!” she said. “Now and then one of us gets what she deserves. That's me. And now and then one of us get's something she doesn't deserve. And that's Natalie. She's over-indulgent to Graham.”
Something in her voice made him turn and look at her.
“That ought to be something, you know,” she added. And laughed a little.
But that was a subject he could not go on with.
“The fault is mine. I know my business better than I know how to handle my life, or my family. I don't know why I trouble you with it all, anyhow. You have enough.” He hesitated. “That's not exactly true, either. I do know. I'm relying on your woman's wit to help me. I'm wrong somehow.”
“I have a curious feeling that I am losing him. I can't ask for his confidence. I can't, apparently, even deserve it. I see him, day after day, with all the good stuff there is in him, working as little as he can, drinking more than he should, out half the night, running into debt--good heavens, Audrey, what can I do?”
“Of course, you know one thing that would save him, Clay?”
“I ought not to have to lose my boy in order to find him. But--we are going to be in it.”
He had risen and was standing, an elbow on the mantel-piece, looking down at her.
“I suppose every man wonders, once in a while, how he'd conduct himself in a crisis. When the Lusitania went down I dare say a good many fellows wondered if they'd have been able to keep their coward bodies out of the boats. I know I did. And I wonder about myself now. What can I do if we go into the war? I couldn't do a forced march of more than five miles. I can't drill, or whatever they call it. I can shoot clay pigeons, but I don't believe I could hit a German coming at me with a bayonet at twenty feet. I'd be pretty much of a total loss. Yet I'll want to do something.”
And when she sat, very silent, looking into the fire: “You see, you think it absurd yourself.”