The Street Called Straight | Page 8

you came. Having got out of a dull
place like Waverton, why should you return to it?"

Looking the more debonair because of the flush in his face and the
gleam in his eye, Guion seated himself in the place his daughter had
left vacant between his two guests. Both his movements and his manner
of speech were marked by a quick jerkiness, which, however, was not
without a certain masculine grace.
"I don't know that I've any better reason," Davenant laughed, snipping
off the end of his cigar, "than that which leads the ox to his
stall--because he knows the way."
"Good!" Guion laughed, rather loudly. Then, stopping abruptly, he
continued, "I fancy you know your way pretty well in any direction you
want to go, don't you?"
"I can find it--if I know where I'm going. I came back to Boston chiefly
because that was just what I didn't know."
"He means," Rodney Temple explained, "that he'd got out of his beat;
and so, like a wise man, he returns to his starting-point."
"I'd got out of something more than my beat; I'd got out of my element.
I found that the life of elegant leisure on which I'd embarked wasn't
what I'd been cut out for."
"That's interesting--very," Guion said. "How did you make the
discovery?"
"By being bored to death."
"Bored?--with all your money?"
"The money isn't much; but, even if it were, it couldn't go on buying
me a good time."
"That, of course, depends on what your idea of a good time may be;
doesn't it, Rodney?"
"It depends somewhat," Rodney replied, "on the purchasing power of
money. There are things not to be had for cash."

"I'm afraid my conception of a good time," Davenant smiled, "might be
more feasible without the cash than with it. After all, money would be a
doubtful blessing to a bee if it took away the task of going out to gather
honey."
"A bee," Guion observed, "isn't the product of a high and complex
civilization--"
"Neither am I," Davenant declared, with a big laugh. "I spring from the
primitive stratum of people born to work, who expect to work, and who,
when they don't work, have no particular object in living on."
"And so you've come back to Boston to work?"
"To work--or something."
"You leave yourself, I see, the latitude of--something."
"Only because it's better than nothing. It's been nothing for so long now
that I'm willing to make it anything."
"Make what--anything?"
"My excuse for remaining on earth. If I'm to go on doing that, I've got
to have something more to justify it than the mere ability to pay my
hotel bill."
"You're luckier than you know to be able to do that much," Guion said,
with one of his abrupt, nervous changes of position. "But you've been
uncommonly lucky, anyhow, haven't you? Made some money out of
that mine business, didn't you? Or was it in sugar?"
Davenant laughed. "A little," he admitted. "But, to any one like you, sir,
it would seem a trifle."
"To any one like me! Listen." He leaned forward, with feverish eyes,
and spoke slowly, tapping on the table-cloth as he did so. "For half a
million dollars I'd sell my soul."

Davenant resisted the impulse to glance at Temple, who spoke
promptly, while Guion swallowed thirstily a glass of cognac.
"That's a good deal for a soul, Henry. It's a large amount of the sure and
tangible for a very uncertain quantity of the impalpable and
problematical."
Davenant laughed at this more boisterously than the degree of humor
warranted. He began definitely to feel that sense of discomfort which in
the last half-hour he had been only afraid of. It was not the
commonplace fact that Guion might be short of money that he dreaded;
it was the possibility of getting a glimpse of another man's inner secret
self. He had been in this position more than once before--when men
wanted to tell him things he didn't want to know--when, whipped by
conscience or crazed by misfortune or hysterical from drink, they tried
to rend with their own hands the veil that only the lost or the desperate
suffer to be torn. He had noted before that it was generally men like
Guion of a high strung temperament, perhaps with a feminine streak in
it, who reached this pass, and because of his own reserve--his rather
cowardly reserve, he called it--he was always impelled to run away
from them. As there was no possibility of running away now, he could
only dodge, by pretending to misunderstand, what he feared Guion was
trying to say.
"So everything you undertook you pulled off successfully?" his host
questioned, abruptly.
"Not everything; some things. I lost money--often; but on the whole I
made