Stacey looked up, with a start. His mind cleared swiftly. The pause before he was able to reply was hardly perceptible. “Oh, hello, Whittaker!” he said, in quite a natural voice. “Thanks.” He rested one foot on the step of the car and frowned. “The only thing is that I don’t know where I want to go. I was just trying to make up my mind.”
The young man at the wheel laughed. He was a big fellow, appearing still bigger because of the enormous fur coat he wore, and had a ruddy face, with pleasant eyes and a hard mouth. He looked like a commercial traveller come into a fortune. “Well,” he said, “that does make it a bit difficult, don’t it? Anyhow, hop in! You certainly don’t want to stick around where you are.”
Stacey obeyed, slamming the door after him, and sat down beside Whittaker, who started the car off slowly along the boulevard.
The young man was of the type known in current slang as “hard boiled.” This quality, however, was not the result of his service in France—he had been a lieutenant of infantry in a different division from Stacey’s. The war had not had the slightest effect on Whittaker. He had always been “hard boiled,” even before the term existed.
“I don’t want to go home,” Stacey explained. “Fed up with home. Where you going? Can’t you take me along?”
The other laughed again. “Sure! I _can_, but you wouldn’t go. Too much of a high-minded puritan. Why, you wouldn’t even end up that dinner we had in Paris in any decent way! I’m going out to Bell’s at Clarefield for the night.”
“All right,” said Stacey, “so will I, if you’ll take me.”
“Well, well, the sky has fallen! My last illusion’s gone! War, thy name is corruption!” Whittaker exclaimed. “Sure! Glad to have you!” he added genially. “Now let’s figure it out. I’ve got a little girl I’m going to take along. We can squeeze you in all right—all the cosier, what? But you’d better go and dig up some one yourself and get _your_ car.”
Stacey shook his head. “No, I’ll ride with you—if I won’t be butting in. Maybe I’ll find some one out there.”
“Maybe,” the other returned dubiously. “But everybody will be pretty much paired off.”
“Drive around to my house and we’ll have a drink while I get a few things together.”
In Stacey’s mind the will to have Marian, the will not to have her, and the anger persisted, but underneath. Above, as the active part, was the matter of this trivial escapade. His dissent from Whittaker’s suggestion that he get his own car and bring another young lady was not due to distaste—nothing so fastidious as that could get a hearing now—but to Stacey’s positive fear of being left alone. If he were left to himself, nothing, as night fell and his longing deepened, could prevent his going to Marian. He must _be_ prevented.