WORLD'S END

It was locked; and this discovery gave Lanny the wildest fright he had ever known. He shrieked at the top of his voice: "Help! Help! Let me out!" The baron tried to quiet him, but Lanny got a big upholstered chair between them, and yelled louder; until the man said: "Be quiet, you little fool, and then I'll open the door." "All right, open it," panted Lanny. When it was open he made the man step away from it, and then dashed out and down the stairs without waiting for the lift.

In the lobby he took a seat, pale and shivering; for a while he thought he was going to be nauseated. Then he saw the bewhiskered baron bringing the magazine which had been left behind. Lanny jumped up and kept backing away; he wouldn't let the Russian get near him. The man was agitated too, and tried to plead; it was all a misunderstanding, he had meant no harm, he had little boys of his own whom he loved, and Lanny reminded him of them.

Such was the situation when Beauty appeared. She saw that something had happened, and the baron tried to explain; the dear little Ъоу had misunderstood him, it was a cruel accident, most embarrassing. Lanny wouldn't speak of it, he just wanted to get out of there. "Please, Beauty, please!" he said, so they went out to the street.

"Have you been hurt?" asked the frightened mother.

But Lanny said: "No, I got away from him." He wouldn't talk about it on the street, and then he wouldn't talk in the car, because Pierre, the chauffeur, could hear them. "Let's go home," he said, and sat holding his mother's hand as tightly as he could.

III

By the time they reached Bienvenu, Lanny had got over some or his agitation, and was wondering whether he could have been making a mistake. But when he told his mother about it she said, no, he had been in real danger; she would like to go and shoot that Russian beast. But she wouldn't tell the youngster what it was about; a kind of fog of embarrassment settled over them, and all Lanny got out of it was anxious monitions never to let any man touch him again, never to go anywhere with any man again - it appeared that he couldn't safely have anything to do with anybody except a few of his mother's intimates.

Beauty had to talk to somebody, and called in her friend Sophie, Baroness de la Tourette. Oh, yes, said that experienced woman of the world, everybody knew about Livens; but what could you do? Have him arrested? It would make a journalist's holiday, he would fight back and blacken you with scandals. Shoot him? Yes, but the French laws were rather strict; the jury would have to be made to weep, and lawyers who can do that charge a fortune. The thing to do was to make the child understand, so that it couldn't happen again.

"But what on earth can I say to him?" exclaimed Beauty.

"Do you mean you haven't given him a straight talk?" demanded her friend.

"I just can't bring myself to it, Sophie. He is so innocent - "

"Innocent, hell!" retorted Sophie Timmons, that henna blonde with the henna laugh; the daughter of a hardware manufacturer who was a piece of hardware herself. "He plays around with these peasant children - don't you suppose they watch the animals and talk about it?. If you heard them you would pass out."

"Oh, my God!" lamented Beauty. "I wish there was no such thing as sex in the world!"

"Well, there's plenty of it on this 'Coast of Pleasure,' and your little one will soon be ready for his share. You'd better wake, up."

"His father is the one who ought to tell him, Sophie."

"All right then, send a cablegram, 'Robbie come at once and tell Lanny the facts of life.' " They both laughed, but it didn't solve the problem. "Couldn't the tutor do it?" suggested the baroness finally.

"I haven't the faintest notion what his ideas are."

"Well, at the worst I should think they'd be better than Livens'," responded the other, dryly.

The Baroness de la Tourette of course told the story all over the place, and Baron Livens-Mazursky found himself cut off from a number of calling lists; he suddenly decided to spend the rest of the winter at Gapri, a place which was not so puritanical as Cannes. Lanny's mother repeated her warnings to the boy, with such solemnity that he began to acquire the psychology of a wild deer in the forest; he looked before he ventured into any dark places, and if he saw anyone, male or female, getting close to him he moved.

IV

But even the wild deer in the forest enjoys life, and Lanny couldn't be kept from wanting to talk to people and find out about them. Soon afterward came the Adventure of the Gigolo, which was the last straw, so Beauty declared. The story of Lanny's gigolo spread among the smart crowd up and down the Riviera, and every now and then someone would ask: "Well, Lanny, how's your gigolo getting along?" He knew they were making fun, but it didn't worry him, for his mind was firmly made up that his gigolo was really a very kind man, much more so than some of the persons who tried to win money from his mother at bridge.