Nick sat quiet.
“You came out of it damned well,” Bill said. “Now she can marry somebody of her own sort and settle down and be happy. You can’t mix oil and water and you can’t mix that sort of thing any more than if I’d marry Ida that works for Strattons. She’d probably like it, too.”
Nick said nothing. The liquor had all died out of him and left him alone. Bill wasn’t there. He wasn’t sitting in front of the fire or going fishing tomorrow with Bill and his dad or anything. He wasn’t drunk. It was all gone. All he knew was that he had once had Marjorie and that he had lost her. She was gone and he had sent her away. That was all that mattered. He might never see her again. Probably he never would. It was all gone, finished.
“Let’s have another drink,” Nick said.
Bill poured it out. Nick splashed in a little water.
“If you’d gone on that way we wouldn’t be here now,” Bill said.
That was true. His original plan had been to go down home and get a job. Then he had planned to stay in Charlevoix all winter so he could be near Marge. Now he did not know what he was going to do.
“Probably we wouldn’t even be going fishing tomorrow,” Bill said. “You had the right dope, all right.”
“I couldn’t help it,” Nick said.
“I know. That’s the way it works out,” Bill said.
“All of a sudden everything was over,” Nick said. “I don’t know why it was. I couldn’t help it. Just like when the three-day blows come now and rip all the leaves off the trees.”
“Well, it’s over. That’s the point,” Bill said.
“It was my fault,” Nick said.
“It doesn’t make any difference whose fault it was,” Bill said.
“No, I suppose not,” Nick said.
The big thing was that Marjorie was gone and that probably he would never see her again. He had talked to her about how they would go to Italy together and the fun they would
