Somehow, miraculously, he had picked him from among the hundreds. Had
picked him as surely as his own father might have. It was Emily's boy.
He was marching by, rather stiffly. He was nineteen, and fun-loving, and
he had a girl, and he didn't particularly want to go to France and--to
go to France. But more than he had hated going, he had hated not to go.
So he marched by, looking straight ahead, his jaw set so that his chin
stuck out just a little. Emily's boy.
Jo looked at him, and his face flushed purple. His eyes, the hard-boiled
eyes of a Loop-hound, took on the look of a sad old man. And suddenly he
was no longer Jo, the sport; old J. Hertz, the gay-dog. He was Jo Hertz,
thirty, in love with life, in love with Emily, and with the stinging
blood of young manhood coursing through his veins.
Another minute and the boy had passed on up the broad street--the fine,
flag-bedecked street--just one of a hundred service-hats bobbing in
rhythmic motion like sandy waves lapping a shore and flowing on.
Then he disappeared altogether.
Emily was clinging to Jo. She was mumbling something, over and over. "I
can't. I can't. Don't ask me to. I can't let him go. Like that. I
can't."
Jo said a queer thing.
"Why, Emily! We wouldn't have him stay home, would we? We wouldn't want
him to do anything different, would we? Not our boy. I'm glad he
enlisted. I'm proud of him. So are you glad."
Little by little he quieted her. He took her to the car that was
waiting, a worried chauffeur in charge. They said good-by, awkwardly.
Emily's face was a red, swollen mass.
So it was that when Jo entered his own hallway half an hour later he
blinked, dazedly, and when the light from the window fell on him you saw
that his eyes were red.
Eva was not one to beat about the bush. She sat forward in her chair,
clutching her bag rather nervously.
"Now, look here, Jo. Stell and I are here for a reason. We're here to
tell you that this thing's got to stop."
"Thing? Stop?"
"You know very well what I mean. You saw me at the milliner's that day.
And night before last, Ethel. We're all disgusted. If you must go about
with people like that, please have some sense of decency."
Something gathering in Jo's face should have warned her. But he was
slumped down in his chair in such a huddle, and he looked so old and fat
that she did not heed it. She went on. "You've got us to consider. Your
sisters. And your nieces. Not to speak of your own----"
But he got to his feet then, shaking, and at what she saw in his face
even Eva faltered and stopped. It wasn't at all the face of a fat,
middle-aged sport. It was a face Jovian, terrible.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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