teeth together, turned away abruptly, and did not finish.
“Throw herself away on whom? Who is this, Robert?”
“Ah-h! that damned little fellow Upshaw that she’s married to: been waiting—praying—hoping that he’d die for months—she’ll marry me just as soon as he’s out of the way—and he knows it! The damned little rat!” He gnashed his teeth savagely. “He’s hanging on just as long as he can to spite us!” And he cursed bitterly, with a terrible unconscious humour, against a man who was too stubborn to oblige him by an early death.
Then he jumped up and said abruptly: “Do you want to go to New York with me?”
“When?”
“Right now!” said Robert. “I’m ready to go this very minute. Come on!”—and he started impatiently toward the door.
When Eugene made no move to follow him, he turned and came back, saying in a resentful tone: “Well, are you coming, or are you just trying to bluff about it?”
For a moment, the boy was infected by the other’s madness, too near akin to his own ever to be wholly strange to him. The prospect of that reckless, drunken, purposeless flight through darkness towards the magic city held him with hypnotic power. Then, rudely, painfully, he broke the spell and answered curtly:
“I wouldn’t go as far as Harvard Square with you tonight, Robert. Not if you’re going to drive that car. You’re too drunk to know what you’re doing and you’ll have a smash-up as sure as you live if you try to drive.”
He was, in fact, wildly and dangerously drunk by now and Eugene began to think of some way of persuading him to go to sleep and of finding some place where he could spend the night: in his own room there was only a single cot, and it was too late to rouse the Murphys—they had been in bed for hours. Then he remembered that Mr. Wang had an extra couch in one of his rooms: it was a very comfortable one and he did not think that Wang would make any objection to Robert’s sleeping there if he explained the situation to him. Therefore, he cautioned Robert to keep quiet, and went to Wang’s door and knocked. Presently he appeared sleepily, thrusting out his fat, drowsy, and troubled face to see what the trouble was: when Eugene told him he agreed very generously and readily to let Robert sleep upon the couch and thus the young man
