Himself----
He staggered before the brief hallucination. The moisture broke out on
his white face. It wasn't enough to hate his father. He had to be
fought down day by day. He was always there, waiting to pounce out.
He lay on his face, pretending to be dead----
It was gone. He shook himself free as from the touch of an evil,
insinuating hand out of the dark. This love was his strength. If
Francey were like his mother, then she was also good. It was these rag
and bobtail friends that poisoned everything. They would have to be
shaken off. Francey was a child, fond of gaiety and pleasure, with no
one to guide her. She didn't understand.
Howard and Gertie Sumners were walking behind him now with the
luncheon-basket between them, talking earnestly in muffled whispers
that were too intimate, and behind them again came the Gang itself,
laughing, jostling one another, exchanging facetiousness in their
medical-Chelsea jargon.
His father would have liked them. Connie Edwards, no doubt, would have
been one of those dazzling, noisy phenomena that burst periodically on
the Stonehouse horizon.
Supposing he should come to like them too--to tolerate their ways,
their loose living, loose thinking----?
He remembered how that very afternoon he had tried to be one of them,
and sickened before himself.
Francey called to him through the darkness.
"Miss Forsyth's so tired, Robert. Couldn't you carry her?"
And he took Christine in his arms, whilst she laughed and protested
feebly.
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