Between Friends

“I beg your pardon, Drene—”

“There wasn’t any!” repeated Drene, with curt contempt. “Don’t talk about her, anyway.”

“You mean I’m not to talk about a common artist’s model—”

“Not that way.”

“Oh. Is she yours?”

“She isn’t anybody’s, I fancy. Therefore, let her alone, or I’ll throw you out of doors.”

Quair said to Guilder after they had departed:

“Fancy old Drene playing about with that girl on a strictly pious basis! He’s doubtless dub enough to waste his time. But what’s in it for her?”

“Perhaps a little unaccustomed masculine decency.”

“Everybody is decent enough to her as far as I know.”

“Including yourself?”

“Certainly, including myself,” retorted Quair, adding naively: “Besides, I knew any attempt at philandering would be time wasted.”

“Yet you tried it,” mused Guilder, entering his big touring car and depositing a bundle of blue-prints and linen tracing paper at his own ponderous feet. Quair followed him and spoke briefly to the chauffeur, then:

“Tried nothing,” he said. “A little chaff, that’s all. When it comes to a man like Jack Graylock going so far as to ask her to marry him, good night, nurse! Nothing doing, even for me.”

“Even for you,” repeated Guilder in his moderate and always modulated voice. “Well, if she’s escaped you and Graylock, she’s beyond any danger from Drene, I fancy.”

Quair smiled appreciatively, as though a delicate compliment had been offered him. Several times on the way to call on Graylock he insisted on stopping the car at as many celebrated cafes. Guilder patiently awaited him in the car and each time Quair emerged from the cafe bar a little more flushed and a trifle jauntier than when he had entered.

He was a man so perfectly attired and so scrupulously fastidious about his person that Guilder often speculated as to just why Quair always seemed to him a trifle soiled.

Now, looking him over as he climbed into the car, unusually red in the face, breathing out the aroma of spirits through his little, pinched nostrils, a faint sensation of disgust came over the senior member of the firm as though the junior member were physically unclean.

“That’s about ten drinks since luncheon,” he remarked, as the car rolled on down Fifth Avenue.

Quair, who usually grew disagreeably familiar when mellow, poked his gloved thumb:

“You’re a merry old cock, aren’t you?” he inquired genially, “—like a pig’s wrist! If I hadn’t the drinking of the entire firm to do, who’d ever talk about Guilder and Quair, architects?”

It was common rumor that Quair did his brilliant work only when “soused.” And he never appeared to be perfectly sober, even when he was.

Graylock received them in his office—a big, reckless-eyed, handsome man, with Broad Street written all over him and “danger” etched in every deepened line of his face.

“Well, how about that business of mine?” he inquired. “It’s all right to keep me waiting, of course, while you and Quair here match for highballs at the Ritz.”

“I had to see Drene—that’s why we are late,” explained Guilder. “We’re ready to go ahead and let your contracts for you—”

“Drene?” interrupted Graylock, looking straight at Guilder with a curious and staring intensity. “Why drag Drene into an excuse?”

“Because we went to his studio,” said Guilder. “Now about letting the contracts—”

“Were you at Drene’s studio?”

“Yes. He’s doing the groups for the new opera for us.”

Quair, watching Graylock, was seized with a malicious impulse:

“Neat little skirt he has up there—that White girl,” he remarked, seating himself on Graylock’s polished table.

A dull flush stained Graylock’s cheekbones, and his keen eyes turned on Quair. The latter lighted a cigarette, expelled the smoke in two thin streams from his abnormally narrow nostrils.

“Some skirt,” he repeated. “And it looks as though old Drene had her number—”

Guilder’s level voice interrupted:

“The contracts are ready to be—”

But Graylock, not heeding, and perhaps not hearing, and looking all the time at Quair, said slowly:

“Drene isn’t that kind.... Is he?”

“Our kind, you mean?” inquired Quair, with a malice so buried under flippancy that the deliberate effrontery passed for it with Graylock. Which amused Quair for a moment, but the satisfaction was not sufficient. He desired that Graylock should feel the gaff.

“Drene,” he said, “is one of those fussers who jellify when hurled on their necks—the kind that ask that kind of girl to marry them after she’s turned down everything else they suggest.”

Graylock’s square jaw tightened and his steady eyes seemed to grow even paler; but Quair, as though perfectly unconscious of this man’s record with the wife of his closest friend, and of the rumors which connected him so seriously with Cecile White, swung his leg unconcernedly, where it dangled over the table’s edge, and smiled frankly and knowingly upon Graylock:

“There’s always somebody to marry that sort of girl; all mush isn’t on the breakfast table. When you and I are ready to quit, Graylock, Providence has created a species of man who settles our bills.”

He threw back his head, inhaled the smoke of his cigarette, sent two thin streams through his nose.

“Maybe Drene may marry her himself. But—I don’t believe he’ll have to.... Now, about those contracts—” he affected a yawn, “—go on and tell him, Guilder,” he added, his words distorted by another yawn.

He stepped down to the floor from his perch on the table, stretched his arms, looking affably all the while at Graylock, who had never moved a muscle.

“I believe you had a run-in with that Cecile girl once, didn’t you, Graylock? Like the rest of us, eh? Oh, well—my hat off to old Drene if he wins out. I hold no malice. After all, Graylock, what’s a woman between friends?”

And he nodded gaily at Graylock and sauntered leisurely to the window.

And kept his back turned, fearful of exploding with laughter in the very face of the man who had been staring at him out of pale, unchanging eyes so steadily and so long.

Guilder’s patient, bored, but moderate voice was raised once more:

“In regard to the letting of these contracts—”

But Graylock, staring at Quair’s back, neither heeded nor heard him, for his brain was still ringing with the mockery of Quair’s words—“What is a woman between friends?” And now, for the first time, he was beginning to understand what the answer might be.