(How he had run that night! As though the devil had been after him
instead of poor breathless little Cosgrave with his innocent
confession.)
"Oh, I'll come," he said.
2
After all, nothing changed very much. Grown-up people masqueraded.
They pretended to laugh at the young fools they had been and were still
behind the elaborate disguise of adult reasonableness and worldly
wisdom. For Robert Stonehouse, at any rate, it was ridiculously the
old business over again--children whose games he despised and could not
play, despising him.
It seemed that she had invited everyone and anyone whose name had come
into her head, without regard for taste or sense, and the result, half
raffish and half brilliant, somehow justified her. The notable and
notorious men there, the bar-loungers whose life gave them a look of
almost pathetic imbecility, the women of fashion and the too
fashionable ladies of the chorus had, at least temporarily, accepted
some common denominator. They rubbed shoulders in the stuffy, dingy,
green-room with an air of complete good-fellowship.
Robert Stonehouse stood alone among them, for nothing in his life had
prepared him to meet them. He had been accustomed to encounter and
master significant hardship, not an apparently meaningless luxury and
aimless pleasure. He knew how to deal with men and women whose
sufferings put them in his power or with men of his own profession, but
these people with their enigmatic laughter, their Masonic greetings,
almost their own language (which was the more troubling since it seemed
his very own), threw him from his security.
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