WORLD'S END

After dinner father and son strolled along the boulevards and looked at the crowds. When they got to the Crillon, there was another cablegram. Lanny began insisting that he wasn't at all tired; surely he could work till bedtime, and so on - when the telephone rang, and Robbie answered. "What?" he cried, and then: "Mon Dieu!" and: "What will that mean?" He listened for a while, then hung up the receiver and said: "Jaurиs has been shot!"

It was the boy's turn to exclaim and question. "Right where we left him," said the father. "Fellow on the street pushed the window curtains aside and put a couple of bullets into the back of his head."

"He's dead?"

"So Pastier reports."

"Who did it, Robbie?"

"Some patriot, they suppose; somebody who thought he was going to oppose the war."

"What will happen now?"

Robbie shrugged his shoulders, almost as if he had been a Frenchman. "It's just one life. If war starts, there'll be a million others. C'est la guerre, as the French say. Pastier says that Germany's expected to declare war on Russia tomorrow; and if so, France is in."

VII

It was hard upon a young fellow who had just assumed an important and responsible position to have to be distracted by the sex problem. Lanny learned how it interferes with business, and all the other serious things of life; he said a plague upon it - for the first time in his life, but not for the last. Here he was, the next morning, comfortably fixed by the window in his bedroom, with the code material and a long message from Connecticut, badly delayed by congestion of the cables. But instead of looking up the word "mar-ketless," he was sitting lost in thought, and presently interrupting his father's reading of the mail. "Robbie, don't you think one of us ought to see Beauty for a few minutes?"

"Anything special?" asked the other, absentmindedly.

"Harry told her last night that she'd have to make up her mind, or he's going back to the States without her. She says it's an ultimatum."

"Well, there's a lot of ultimatums being served right now. One more hardly counts."

"Don't joke, Robbie. She's terribly upset."

"What's she doing?"

"Just sitting staring in front of her."

"Has she got a looking glass?"

Lanny saw that his father was determined to keep out of it; so he looked up the word "marketless." But before he started on the word "lightening," he interrupted again. "Robbie, does it often happen that a woman thinks she is in love with two men and can't decide which?"

"Yes," said the father, "it happens to both men and women." He put down the letter he was reading and added: "It happened to me, when I had to decide whether I was going to get married or not." It was the first time Robbie had ever spoken of that event to his son, and the boy waited to see if he'd say more. "I had to make up my mind, and I did. And now Beauty has to do it. It won't hurt her to sit staring in front of her. She's owed it to herself for a long while to do some serious thinking."

So Lanny looked up "lightening," and three or four words more. But he couldn't help trying once again. "Robbie, you don't want me to give Beauty advice; but I've already given her some, and I know it's counting with her. You don't think it was good advice?"

"It wasn't what I'd give her; but it may be right for her. She's a sentimental person, and it seems she's very much in love with that painter fellow."

"Oh, really she is, Robbie. I watched them all the time on the yacht. Anybody could see it."

"But he's a lot younger than she is; and that's going to make a tragedy some day."

"You mean, Marcel will stop loving her?"

"Not entirely, perhaps; he'll be torn in half, just the way she is now."

"You mean he'll get interested in some younger woman?"

"I mean he'll have to be a saint if he doesn't; and I haven't met any saints among French painters."

"You ought to know Marcel better, Robbie. He is one of the very best men I ever have met."

"I'm taking your word for him. But there's a lot you still must learn, son. Beauty would be poor - that is, by the standards of everyone she knows or wants to know. And that's awful hard on the affections. It gets worse and worse as you get older, too."

"You think it's right for people to marry for money, then?"

"I think there's an awful lot of bunk talked on the subject. People fool themselves, and try to fool other people. I've watched marriages, scores of them, and I know that money was the important element in most. It was dressed up in fine words, of course; it was called 'family,' and 'social position,' and 'culture,' and 'refinement.' "

"But aren't those things real?"

"Sure they are. Each is like a fine house; it's built on a foundation - and the foundation is money. If you build a house without any foundation, it doesn't last long."

"I see," said the boy. It impressed him greatly, like everything his father said.