coach plush of trains, the smell of bridges and of old wharves and piers, of hot tarred roofing, and of tar out in the streets, of summer’s fatigue, quietness, and summer’s ending, the quiet and tranquil sorrow of memory as we remember youth, our father’s voice upon the nighttime summer porch, the smell of the grape-vines and the ripened grapes, the grinding screech and halt of a street-car on the hill above our father’s house, and the knowledge that all this is lost, our father dead, our childhood gone, another year, our first in the great man-swarm of the city, ended—and this, the knowledge of the bitter briefness of out days, is somehow mixed with the smell of the sea in harbours, the freshening breeze of evening, the call of ships, and, somehow, God knows how, with the intolerable thrill and promise of the unknown voyage.
And with this breath of autumn and the promise of the voyage there came to Eugene the news that Starwick was at that moment in the city—would stop there briefly on his way to Europe. At this time, also, Joel Pierce turned up and Eugene renewed an acquaintance that had begun in Cambridge and lapsed during the interim.
LVII
He had never met any of Joel Pierce’s family, but one night towards seven o’clock when he had just returned to his room from the university, Joel telephoned him, and, saying that his father was in town, asked him if he would go to dinner and to the theatre with them. He found Joel and his father waiting for him in the lobby. Mr. Pierce was a man of fifty years, comfortably dressed for the hot weather in a black mohair suit, and with a kind of stately yet spacious dignity of linen that was agreeably old-fashioned and that evoked a picture of an older and more leisurely generation. He was quite deaf—so deaf, in fact, that he made use of a small ear-phone—but his speech and manners, like his dress, were easy, friendly, and yet touched with an air of distinguished authority.
He took the two boys to the Lafayette for dinner, and ordered generously and with the easy and comforting assurance of a man of the world who gives everyone around him a happy feeling of security and well-being. For Eugene, it was a memorable experience.
The fine restaurant—it was perhaps the finest he had yet seen—the French waiters, the delicious
