The Plastic Age Percy Marks (read full novel txt) 📖

suddenly conscious of the fact that he wasn’t fair. Some of the fraternities, he knew, would never stand for any such performance as he had witnessed that evening; most of them, he was sure, wouldn’t. It was just the Nu Deltas and one or two others; well, maybe three or four. So that’s what he had joined, was it?

He thought of Hester Sheville, of her whisky breath, her lascivious pawing⁠—and his hands clenched. “Filthy little rat,” he said aloud, “the stinkin’, rotten rat.”

Then he remembered that there had been girls there who hadn’t drunk anything, girls who somehow managed to move through the whole orgy calm and sweet. His anger mounted. It was a hell of a way to treat a decent girl, to ask her to a dance with a lot of drunkards and soused rats.

He was warm with anger. Reckless of the buttons, he tore off his waistcoat and threw it on a chair. The jeweled fraternity pin by the pocket caught his eye. He stared at it for a moment and then slowly unpinned it. He let it lie in his hand and addressed it aloud, hardly aware of the fact that he was speaking at all.

“So that’s what you stand for, is it? For snobs and politicians and muckers. Well, I don’t want any more of you⁠—not⁠—one⁠—damn⁠—bit⁠—more⁠—of⁠—you.”

He tossed the pin indifferently upon the center-table, making up his mind that he would resign from the fraternity the next day.

When the next day came he found, however, that his anger had somewhat abated. He was still indignant, but he didn’t have the courage to go through with his resignation. Such an action, he knew, would mean a great deal of publicity, publicity impossible to avoid. The fraternity would announce its acceptance of his resignation in “The Sanford Daily News”; and then he would either have to lie or start a scandal.

As the days went by and he thought more and more about the dance, he began to doubt his indignation. Wasn’t he after all a prude to get so hot? Wasn’t he perhaps a prig, a sissy? At times he thought that he was; at other times he was sure that he wasn’t. He could be permanently sure of only one thing, that he was a cynic.

XX

Hugh avoided the Nu Delta house for the remainder of the term and spent more time on his studies than he had since he had entered college. The result was, of course, that he made a good record, and the A that Henley gave him in English delighted him so much that he almost forgot his fraternity troubles. Not quite, however. During the first few weeks of the vacation he often thought of talking to his father about Nu Delta, but he could not find the courage to destroy his father’s illusions. He found, too, that he couldn’t talk to his mother about things that he had seen and learned at college. Like most of his friends, he felt that “the folks wouldn’t understand.”

He spent the first two months at home working on the farm, but when Norry Parker invited him to visit him for a month on Long Island Sound, Hugh accepted the invitation and departed for the Parker summer cottage in high feather. He was eager to see Norry again, but he was even more eager to see New York. He had just celebrated his twentieth birthday, and he considered it disgraceful that he had never visited the “Big City,” as New York was always known at Sanford. Norry met him at Grand Central, a livelier and more robust Norry than Hugh had ever seen. The boy actually seemed like a boy and not a sprite; his cheeks were tanned almost brown, and his gray eyes danced with excitement when he spotted Hugh in the crowd.

“Gee, Hugh, I’m glad to see you,” he exclaimed, shaking Hugh’s hand joyously. “I’m tickled to death that you could come.”

“So am I,” said Hugh heartily, really happy to see Norry looking so well, and thrilled to be in New York. “Gosh, you look fine. I hardly know you. Where’d you get all the pep?”

“Swimming and sailing. This is the first summer I’ve been well enough to swim all I want to. Oh, it’s pretty down where we are. You’ll love the nights, Hugh. The Sound is wonderful.”

“I’ll bet. Well, where do we go from here? Say, this is certainly a whale of a station, isn’t it? It makes me feel like a hick.”

“Oh, you’ll get over that soon enough,” Norry, the seasoned New Yorker, assured him easily. “We’re going right out to the cottage. It’s too hot today to run around the city, but we’ll come in soon and you can give it the once-over.” He took Hugh’s arm and led him out of the station.

It had never entered Hugh’s mind that Norry’s father might be rich. He had noticed that Norry’s clothes were very well tailored, and Norry had told him that his violin was a Cremona, but the boy was not lavish with money and never talked about it at all. Hugh was therefore surprised and a little startled to see Norry walk up to an expensive limousine with a uniformed chauffeur at the wheel. He wondered if the Parkers weren’t too high-hat for him?

“We’ll go right home, Martin,” Norry said to the chauffeur. “Get in, Hugh.”

The Parker cottage was a short distance from New Rochelle. It was a beautiful place, hardly in the style of a Newport “cottage” but roomy and very comfortable. It was not far from the water, and the Parkers owned their own boathouse.

Mrs. Parker was on the veranda when the car drew up at the steps.

“Hello, Mother,” Norry called.

She got up and ran lightly down the steps, her hand held out in welcome to Hugh.

“I know that you are Hugh Carver,” she said in a beautifully modulated voice, “and I am really delighted to meet you. Norry has talked so much about