And then, when the meal was two-thirds over, Marjorie wished she hadn't
offered up any prayers for help to get through the situation. Because
softly up to their table strolled a tall, thin young man with a cane,
gray silk gloves, and a dreamy if slightly nervous look, and said
discontentedly, "Marjorie Ellison! How wonderful to find you here!
You will let me sit down at your table, won't you, and meet your
soldier-friend?"
If Marjorie had never written to Francis about Bradley Logan it would
have been all right, quite a rescue, in fact. But in those too fatally
discursive letters; the letters which had come finally to feel like a
sympathetic diary with no destination, she had rather enlarged on him.
He had been admiring her at disconnected intervals ever since she first
met him. He had not been able to get in the army because of some
mysterious neurasthenic ailment about which he preserved a hurt
silence, as to details, but mentioned a good deal in a general way. It
kept him from making engagements, it made him unable to go long
distances; Marjorie had described all the scattered hints about it in
her letters to Francis, who had promptly written back that undoubtedly
the little friend had fits; and referred to him thereafter, quite
without malice, as, "your fit-friend." She had an insane terror, as
she introduced him, lest she should explain him to Francis in an
audible aside by that name. However, it was unnecessary. Francis
placed him immediately, it was to be seen, and was cold almost to
rudeness. Logan did not notice it much. He sat down with them,
declined the food Marjorie offered, ordered himself three slivers of
dry toast and a cup of lemonless and creamless tea, and sipped them and
nibbled them as if even they were a concession to manners.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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