And Oliver is too sleepy to argue the point. Besides he knows quite well that any arguments he can use will only drive Ted, in his present state of mind, a good deal farther and faster along the road he has so dramatically picked out for himself. So, between trying to think of some means of putting either sense or the fear of God into Elinor Piper, whatever Ted may say about it, and wondering how the latter would take a suggestion to come over to Melgrove for a while instead of starting an immoral existence with that beautiful but possessive friend of Louise's, he drops off to sleep. XXXIII Oliver had depended on Ted's noisy habits in dressing and packing to wake him and give them a chance to talk before Ted left--but when he woke it was to hear a respectful servantly voice saying “Ten o'clock, sir!” and his first look around the room showed him that Ted's bed was empty and Ted's things were gone. There was a scribbled note propped up against the mirror, though. “Dear Ollie: “So long--and thanks for both good advice and sympathy. The latter helped if the former didn't. Drop me a message at 252A as soon as you decide on this French proposition. I'm serious about it. TED.” By the time he had read this through, Oliver began to feel rather genuinely alarmed. He could not believe that the whole affair between Ted and Elinor Piper had gone so utterly wrong as the note implied--he had had a whimsical superstition that it must succeed because he was playing property man to it after his own appearance as Romeo had failed--but he knew Ted and the two years' fight against the struggling nervous restlessness and discontent with everything that didn't have either speed or danger in it that the latter, like so many in his position, had had to make. His mouth tightened--no girl on earth, even Nancy, could realize exactly what that meant--the battle to recover steadiness and temperance and sanity in a temperament that was in spite of its poised externals most brilliantly sensitive, most leapingly responsive to all strong stimuli--a temperament moreover that the war and the armistice between them had turned wholly toward the stimuli of fever--and Ted had made it with neither bravado nor bluster and without any particular sense of doing very much--and now this girl was going to smash it and him together as if she were doing nothing more important than playing with jackstones.