Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis [38]
When she next returned to him, besieged by three capering medics, he muttered to her, “Oh, it doesn’t MATTER about ME!”
“Would you like this one? COURSE you shall have it!” She turned to him fully; she had none of Madeline’s sense of having to act for the benefit of observers. Through a strained eternity of waiting, while he glowered, she babbled of the floor, the size of the room, and her “dandy partners.” At the sound of the music he held out his arms.
“No,” she said. “I want to talk to you.” She led him to a corner and hurled at him, “Sandy, this is the last time I’m going to stand for your looking jealous. Oh, I know! See here! If we’re going to stick together — and we are!— I’m going to dance with just as many men as I want to, and I’m going to be just as foolish with ’em as I want to. Dinners and those things — I suppose I’ll always go on being a clam. Nothing to say. But I love dancing, and I’m going to do exactly what I want to, and if you had any sense whatever, you’d know I don’t care a hang for anybody but you. Yours! Absolute. No matter what fool things you do — and they’ll probably be a plenty. So when you go and get jealous on me again, you sneak off and get rid of it. Aren’t you ashamed of yourself!”
“I wasn’t jealous — Yes, I was. Oh, I can’t help it! I love you so much. I’d be one fine lover, now wouldn’t I, if I never got jealous!”
“All right. Only you’ve got to keep it under cover. Now we’ll finish the dance.”
He was her slave.
IV
It was regarded as immoral, at the University of Winnemac, to dance after midnight, and at that hour the guests crowded into the Imperial Cafeteria. Ordinarily it closed at eight, but tonight it kept open till one, and developed a spirit of almost lascivious mirth. Fatty Pfaff did a jig, another humorous student, with a napkin over his arm, pretended to be a waiter, and a girl (but she was much disapproved) smoked a cigarette.
At the door Clif Clawson was waiting for Martin and Leora. He was in his familiar shiny gray suit, with a blue flannel shirt.
Clif assumed that he was the authority to whom all of Martin’s friends must be brought for judgment. He had not met Leora. Martin had confessed his double engagement; he had explained that Leora was unquestionably the most gracious young woman on earth; but as he had previously used up all of his laudatory adjectives and all of Clif’s patience on the subject of Madeline, Clif failed to listen, and prepared to dislike Leora as another siren of morality.
He eyed her now with patronizing enmity. He croaked at Martin behind her back, “Good-looking kid, I will say that for her — what’s wrong with her?” When they had brought their own sandwiches and coffee and mosaic cake from the long counter, Clif rasped:
“Well, it’s grand of a couple of dress-suit swells like you to assassinate with me ‘mid the midmosts of sartorials and Sassiety. Gosh, it’s fierce I had to miss the select pleasures of an evening with Anxious Duer and associated highboys, and merely play a low game of poker — in which Father deftly removed the sum of six simolea, point ten, from the fore-gathered bums and yahoos. Well, Leory, I suppose you and Martykins here have now ratiocinated all these questions of polo and, uh, Monte Carlo and so on.”
She had an immense power of accepting people as they were. While Clif waited, leering,