Edwin Balmer

“ You can believe it a night like this."
"Suppose Stanley Alban's there?" asked Jay—or Lida's restless soul? This he did not say, nor did he think of Lida lost. Not Lida, but the lights kept her in his mind. Suddenly, while Ellen and he watched, the dead tired of their dance; the Aurora dimmed away.
In the dark he grasped Ellen's slim little hand; motor lights, from the north, gleamed far up the road.
"I don't like to leave this place," said Jay. "I don't like to leave you. I'd like to stretch out this day and keep you." ”

“ Three hundred and thirty miles away, at the tip of Lake Huron where the tiny isle of Mackinac lay like an emerald goal, it was ten degrees cooler only. Heat lay over all the lakes—violent, fiery July heat; but the wind was Steady and almost abeam, wherefore the crew of the Arletta smiled and sang, and hung a cap over the barometer. For the Arletta was a fair-weather boat, light and fast. Seldom could a sloop stay in sight with her, when all canvas was spread; she liked to lean before the wind and skurry and skim. ”

“ In the sheer sides of the buildings, in the gleaming windows, in the pinnacles of the roofs, in the resound underfoot, in the snatches of talk, in the click of canes and women's heels, in soft scents, colors, smart shoulders and hats, in the glance of eyes, in the air itself, because it was New York, was excitation. To marry, marry Lida Haige, was become much more a matter of mere procedure than could have been conceivable in Chicago.
Here, people enterprised in intimate experience easily, lightly, expertly. In Chicago, the idea had done more violence ”

“ That was the draw of business, to-day, which filled the cities. It demanded a different quality in a man from any that her father possessed; though once, for half an hour, all the world had waited upon him. This was what she had felt and once even had tried to say to Jay and had not been able then to explain it.
She reached for her father's hand. The finest man in the world. Oh, she loved him! But here, a train was whistling. Jay was upon it—Jay who would take her away, his wife! ”

“ In every city and town with a newspaper, people telephoned, between editions, for news of the men on the mast of the ship sunken in Lake Superior. No tragedy, in months, had so stirred the public. They felt not only the plight of the five men; they felt the challenge to civilization in the helplessness of mankind to save or even to aid, in the slightest, the five men slowly dying in sight of all.
The prayers, which composed the sole possibly effective effort of man, pleaded for the gale to diminish, but the storm, instead, strengthened and worked around out of the north. ”

“ Suddenly Ellen's breast was aflutter as she gazed at Jay, in the sunlight and spotted shade of the trees, and there was made clear to her the roots of the hostility between his father and him which had enlisted her with him before ever she had seen him.
Jay had been born with the knack to prosper through his liking for people and theirs for him; it endowed him with ability to succeed by merely forming personal relations which set at nothing and ignored the father's training to things; and this, to his father, was what was wrong in the world. His father wouldn't have it, in the world ”

“ His father told how, long ago, he had found Jay failing in duty and responsibility; how he had battled with Jay's idleness, godlessness, extravagance, drinking—and worse.
"Worse, I feared, from the company he kept," charged his father; "I feared, but did not prove until this . . . episode with you."
Lida started to speak but at this Jay touched her; and his father silenced her by raising his voice: "I am not charging that chiefly to you. Adam's excuse to God never made, to a man, Eve the chief sinner. I blame my son far more than you; but I blame you." ”

“ Ellen did not flatter herself that she was more attractive, femininely, than other girls who were undoubtedly obtainable by Lew, but she knew the type of man that cares nothing for the cheaply obtained. It was the type that liked to destroy, and to destroy no easily bought stranger but one who had long defied and delayed him and upon whom he had often looked. It was this which, vaguely, she had realized and which had underlain her remark to Jay that Lew Alban would not be as simple for the Slengels as Sam Metten. ”

“ Leeda; my wife . . ." The idea ran into images of her in his arms; Lida embracing him; her kisses; his lips on hers.
Pleasant in a car to kiss her and embrace her; or under the trees after a dance. She was a warm little sprite. He liked her, that way. He had liked her very much as a companion in the light-hearted, reckless expeditions in Westchester county and Connecticut. She had delighted in them; and they had done no harm, no real harm—until Nucast.
When Jay had let her know that he would be in New York for a weekend, Lida would "sign out" at school but she would not go home. ”

“ Jay laughed a little; certainly there was something to be said for Lida's theory, if a man could get away with it within himself.
His father's idea was pretty much the polar opposite—work, keep everlastingly at it; long hours and close attention to detail; go to bed tired; and rise to work. This never had made any appeal to Jay; he always had combated it. He believed in some work but in joy, too; short hours and plenty of play and pleasure. He had taken, in college, too much, perhaps, but he felt that altogether he was more right than his father. ”

“ Ellen thought of Di here in the-outer office, tapping at a typewriter, with her mind never on her work, her fingers perfectly manicured, always, but fumbling. Her head (the inside of it) and her hands (the skill of them) held no threat to Rountree, though the Slengels employed her. Her loveliness and femininity and allure for men endowed her with a different power, when she ceased trying to be a working-girl and became just . . . woman.
There were several men to whom Ellen was attractive not for the competency of her hands and head, but for her femininity. ”

“ Do you like them better than the people at home?" he demanded, and glanced out the window over the lake—Lida's sea, choked with ice and floe. "Your father works at a clean, clear job; he sails his ship; he sets his course and keeps it; loads his ore, goes back in ballast, and loads again. No Nu—" Jay caught himself quickly. "No Lew Alban and no Metten brothers can make any difference to him. Nothing but wind and weather can touch him. Would you like your father in business . . . holding Metten?"
"Not father," said Ellen quickly, and gasping a little so that Jay laughed at her. ”

“ She retreated; and through the door beat and beat the voice of his father, who believed the boy had done that thing and, so believing, was making disposition in these minutes of Jay's years ahead; of all his years ahead.
"Marry . . . marry," Ellen heard. It was plain that Mr. Rountree commanded him to marry Lida Haige. It was plain that this was what Jay proposed to do; so it was the very thing which his father, instead of enforcing, should prevent! For there was an element in this affair of which he was completely ignorant, and which Jay would not tell. ”

“ But how absurd to-day to stick on a point of objection to the color of a coat!
At City Hall, they stood with clerks, with a streetsweeper, with an earringed groom of black, oily curls and beshawled bride, with a pallid pair of lovers, exceedingly frightened. An odd lot to carry photographed in your mind all your life. Jay knew he would see these people, at sudden moments, throughout his life.
"Now how'll we be married?" he asked Lida, when in their cab again. ”

“ Ellen was not and would not. To her, marriage must remain a permanent relation, entered into once and for all. It formed, incomparably, the transcendent act of a girl's life. She came in contact with, only to deny, the idea of it held by girls born and bred like Lida under conditions which never made of constancy anything more serious than a matter of choice and where marriage was only one of the innumerable expedients of a girl's social career.
Accordingly Ellen did not think of Lida's relation with Jay from Lida's point of view; she thought of Lida as likely to claim Jay for life. ”

“ At a party for business, there must be no stag line; every man at every moment must be entertained; there must be extra girls to compete for them.
The girl whom Di knew, but who had not spoken to her, was peering at Di in her hand mirror. She was white-skinned, blue-eyed, blondined and with overstained finger nails.
"'Lo, Rene," hailed Di, pleasantly; and was glad she was here, for Irene Pierce was her understudy although, in another sense, her rival for Jello. She was employed this evening to make it particularly joyful for Sam Metten. ”

“ Office hours! That's Chicago for you. Chicago still thinks business is done in offices. There's only one good reason for any busy man to have an office; it collects for him, all in one place, everybody he doesn't want to see. It's a great help, that way. A man has all his time to give to business, if he just keeps away from his office.
"Jay, I've been trying for two years to get to the real man who does the big buying for Howarth down here. He's your friend Ken's cousin. What d'you do to-day, after you meet the boat?" ”

“ Jay knew the one named Thurston: lots of money; lots of time; and he liked Lida. Jay had met him at Lida's school.
Jay hurried, without breakfast, to meet Lew Alban's train; for at this hour, Lew would not have breakfasted. Jay meant to take Lew to the Club. It was rotten weather and not even a Chicago slave could deny it; cold, low clouds and a hanging haze of smoke which demanded street lamps and motor headlights and permitted hardly a hint of the dawn. But Ellen Powell, Jay considered, was rising to go out in it.
Art Slengel was at the train-gate. ”

“ The pins in the map of the two hemispheres would represent past performance only in the Rountree family; the Slengels, in their map, would thrust fresh, triumphant pins.
Jay's pulses pricked with the instinct of fight for these things; it was the feeling that Lida summed up in her epithet of the "Chicago" in him. It was amusing and irrational, when you got outside yourseli—if ever you really got outside yourself—to assert that Jay Rountree should stay in Chicago, because he had been born here, and set to selling these things, because his father and grandfather had made them. ”

“ Not everyone yet understood what the voice in the radio told but its tone could not be mistaken.
"The Blenmora is coming in slowly. The moon is clear again and the Donagon keeps its searchlight on the Blenmora and the waters directly ahead. She is in very heavy seas and, being light, she rolls; water is flying over her. . . . On the mast, as some of you know, there is a man who had been seen all day beating at his comrades to keep them active and alive. As you look at him in the glass, he seems to move; but you can't be sure; it may be shadows from the swinging searchlight of the Loring!" ”

“ I'm not trading personal friendship with my wife for business."
"Too late," retorted Lowry warmly. "They're already your friends—and your wife's. They've told it to the world. They've mailed the Tryston papers around to all their friends to prove it. Your wife's in this and she's got to stay in. The women come to count more than the men in any affair like this. You let your wife cool toward the Mettens and the Angel Gabriel couldn't hold to Rountree the Metten business, which is like lifeblood to this firm just now." ”

“ So that was why Lowry had Phil Metten here this morning and was so nervous about the impression made by Jay.
He realized that he had been keeping Metten waiting for an appointment with his father; but Metten did not seem to mind or to be in any hurry now. He made a joke and Jay smiled; at what, he wondered afterwards. The funny thing was in his own mind; and it was that Nucast was paying him, and he was put in the position of receiving payment, but no penny of it went to his empty pockets. You might as well smile at being broke, absolutely, and marrying under the conditions. ”

“ Their situation had not changed; slowly and in the order of their strength, the men must die this night while the world watched them.
Ellen longed to be in the throng on the shore; it would be terrible to stand there, actually seeing and able to do nothing; but the throng about the bonfires, and those going in and out of the little church, were her own people. She longed to stand with her own; she longed for escape from New York this night.
She longed, that meant, to dodge again Lew Alban; but for her, to-night, Lew would "pass up" Slengel; it pleased him to pass up Slengel for her. ”

“ Jay said, "and nothing could turn it sourer than for me to ask him for business." He winced at the idea. "Can you imagine it? Even on the business side, it would be the one worst move; but wait and say nothing, and Lyman will work the account around to me."
He struck his fist in the palm of his hand. "But we have to have time—time—and hold Alban, somehow. Lyman can't go to his father and say 'give our business to a failing concern.' We have to be going, and going strong to get Howarth; and never let them guess how we need them." ”