her son’s friend with that glacially brilliant smile of her thin and faintly carmined lips that never changed or altered in expression by an atom. “Oh,” she said, “I should like to—perhaps you will read it to me some time.”
“Simply superb,” Joel whispered, “it really is.”
“And now you boys had better get ready for lunch,” she said in a more warm and friendly tone. “You know how Granny hates it if people get there late.”
With these words she went into the house and mounted the stairs. The young men followed her: at the foot of the stairs Joel turned and said to his visitor:
“Look—I’d hurry as much as I could!… We’ve only twenty minutes: you’ve just got time to bathe and dress.”
Bathe and dress! The youth looked at his young host with a bewildered, uncomprehending face, and with a sinking feeling in his heart. What did they expect him to do—what, according to the formula of these strange rare people, was one supposed to do when one was invited out to lunch? He had bathed that morning when he got up, it seemed to him that he must still be very clean, and as for dressing, he had just one suit of clothes in all the world, and that was the suit he was wearing at that moment. And just one day before, when he had left New York to come to this magical, unbelievably glorious place, he had thought, in his miserable naïve ignorance, that this one suit of clothes, three shirts, three pairs of socks, and a change of underwear were abundantly sufficient to all the demands that fashion and a week-end visit could possibly make on him. At that moment, as he stared at his friend with a gaping mouth, unable to reply, the terrific impact of this new world which had stunned him the night before with its magnificence and beauty exploded in his brain in a flare of stars and rockets. And for a moment now he felt a lost, sickening desperate terror, and curiously, a feeling of blind resentment against his friend. For a moment he felt tricked and deceived—deceived by Joel’s modesty, his exquisite humility, by the frayed and shabby clothes he had worn in Cambridge and New York, by the over-refinement of his breeding, which had caused him to conceal utterly his true state of life, never to suggest by a word or reference the kind of life that he came from, the wealth, the luxury, the magnificence of the world in which he had been born and lived.
“D-d-dress!… But… how—,” his face reddened, he craned his neck doggedly, and suddenly blurted out:
