Point of No Return by John P. Marquand

guts.”
    â€œHow do you mean, guts?” Charles asked.
    â€œSaying what you do,” Malcolm said, “doing what you do, takes guts. You’re a very nice boy, Charley.”
    â€œI wish,” Charles said, “you’d stop calling me a nice boy.”
    â€œWell, you are,” Malcolm said, “and it takes guts to be your type, these days. Good-by, good luck, Charley.”
    â€œPut me down in Category E,” Charles said. “Good luck, Malcolm, and thanks.”
    â€œThanks for what?” Malcolm asked.
    â€œSince you ask me, I don’t exactly know,” Charles said, “but thanks.”

5
    Everything Fits into Banking Somewhere
    Though common sense told Charles that he should hurry, some other inner impulse made him walk with perverse slowness, as you did when you tried to hurry in a dream. The sun had finally broken through the clouds and the sky was almost entirely blue and when he reached Fifth Avenue he came to a stop. He saw the sunlight hit the wings of a plane that must have risen from La Guardia Field just a minute or so before, and in spite of the noise on the Avenue he could hear the drumming of the motors. The green lights were on and he watched the steady flow of the traffic as though the sight were new to him—yellow cabs, green-and-white cabs, and the new buses, so different from the old ones with the open tops. The sun was still high enough to shine through some plate-glass windows on a display of men’s colored shirts—maroons, blues, salmon pinks and canary yellows. He still could not get used to colored shirts even though they were quite the thing now to wear at the country club on Sunday.
    Everything was changing and Fifth Avenue was changing too, in spite of all the efforts of the Fifth Avenue Association; but then Fifth Avenue had always been in a state of flux, with old buildings coming down and new ones going up, the old ones crumbling into rubble and being poured into the wreckers’ trucks. It was always changing, but the spirit of it was still as young, confident, and blatant as when Henry James had written of it long ago. It still conveyed the same message that it had when he had walked along it on that first visit with his father. The motion of it had the same strength and eagerness, so different from the more stately motion of Piccadilly and the Strand.
    â€œEaster Parade” by Irving Berlin … He had gone with Nancy to that musical show and it must have been in the winter of 1934 when they still lived in a walk-up apartment on West Eighteenth Street. They had paid Mrs. Sweeney, whose husband was a policeman, a dollar to sit listening for the baby, and they had not been to the theater once that year or the year before. ’Thirty-four had been bad enough, though nothing to ’thirty-three. They had gone to dinner in a small French restaurant and had taken the bus up Fifth Avenue and had walked across to Broadway. When the chorus had sung that song about Fifth Avenue he had been holding Nancy’s hand, just as he used to when he took her to the Capitol before they were married.… He must have been deathly tired because he had dozed off in the darkness in the middle of it and she had dug her elbow in his ribs and he still remembered her whisper.
    â€œWake up. Don’t waste your money sleeping.”
    It had been quite a while, in fact not since he had been upstairs at the Stuyvesant, since anyone had made a remark to him about staying out too long at lunch; and there was never the slightest criticism now that he was downstairs, at a desk near the front window. There was still the inner compulsion never to be late, but at the same time it was your privilege. Tardiness could be excused on the assumption that you were having a business lunch with a client. Nevertheless, Charles knew that Miss Marble and Joe had been wondering where he had been, and it did not help to see that Roger Blakesley was busy at his