His relatives denied it. They had never liked Cora Boyle. She wasn’t a lady and her clothes had shocked Sadie’s conservative mind. They pointed out that a stable and meritorious woman wouldn’t have seduced Mark before marriage. They were glad to see the boy free and were puzzled by his mournfulness. He agreed with their judgments. But his eyes moistened for all their affectionate pawing. He muttered, “She was awful good lookin’,” and sat moody while they indicated advantages. He could save his pay, now, and wear respectable, black neckties, as a Walling should. He wouldn’t be bullied or have hot curling irons flung in his face. He could come home on the Saturday midnight train and stay until Monday afternoon. And Joe reasonably assured him that women were plentiful. But Mark mourned, in his tangled fashion, the collapse of beauty. Cora, he choked, didn’t match her outside. She was ruthless, disturbing. She cared nothing for Mark’s pet plan of an ideal lighting system for theatres. She had spilled coffee on his smudged, laborious chart of a stage to be made in hinged parts. She called his sacred family a parcel of mossbacks and left the flat when Sadie and Bernamer brought their baby to town for a day. Still, Mark was mournful and often missed her for several years. He shuddered from marriage as a game more complicated than golf. He was playing golf in May, 1902, with Ian Gail when the English playwright checked his grammar. Mark flushed. The Englishman fooled with a putter for a second, considering this colour. He said, “I say, old son, d’you mind my giving you some advice?” “Go ahead.” “Carlson’s closing the play next week, he tells me. What will you do with yourself, all summer?” “Go home.” “Where’s that and what’s it like?” Mark sat down on the green and chattered of the farm, and his family with particular mention of his nephew George Dewey Bernamer (born May 15, 1898) who called himself Gurdy. About Joe Walling’s baby daughter Mark wasn’t as yet enthusiastic. He talked with broad lapses into New Jersey singsong. His grey eyes dilated. He babbled like an upset pail. The lean Englishman didn’t seem bored. Other people--Mrs. LeMoyne, old Mrs. Gilbert--had scolded Mark about these explosions. Gail let him talk for twenty minutes of warm noon and then said, “Quite right, old son. Stick to your people.... You’re a sentimental ass, of course. I dare say that’s why you can put up with dinner at Carlson’s in that seething mass of red plush.” “But I like Mr. Carlson. Been mighty good--” “Of course he’s good to you. And it was good of you to make him mount my last act so decently.... For some reason or other you’ve an eye for decoration. That’s by the way.--Now, I’ve a female cousin in Winchester, a Mrs. Ilden. She writes bad novels that no one reads and her husband’s in the Navy. I’m going to write her about you. You run across after the play stops. She’ll put you up for a month and you’ll pay her--I suggest a hundred pounds.”