So Little Time by John P. Marquand Page B

said.
    â€œNaturally,” Minot answered, “we’ll have another drink, but first let’s give Madge the old song, shall we?”
    â€œWhat old song?” Jeffrey asked.
    â€œCome on,” Minot said, “one, two, three—”
    â€œOh, I’m looking for a happy land where everything is bright, Where the hangouts grow on bushes and we stay out every night …”
    While they were singing it Jeffrey forgot about the strange, chaotic day—Waldo Berg and the Bulldog Club and Walter Newcombe and Madge and Gwen and Jim and the apartment—and he forgot what he had been thinking about Minot because Minot gave him too that sense of security of which Madge had been speaking.
    â€œYou’ll take care of him, won’t you, Minot?” Madge asked. “And Jeff, dear, you’d better sleep in the study in case you fall over things.… Oh, Jim, here’s Uncle Minot, dear.”
    Jim came into the living room, ready to go out, too. His dinner coat made him stand up straighter.
    â€œHow about a lift,” he asked, “if you’re going as far as Park Avenue and 52d Street?”
    â€œWe’re going to a happy land where everything is bright,” Minot said, “and 52d Street is on the way. Well, well, look at him.”
    â€œWhat about him?” Jeffrey asked.
    Minot Roberts was smiling at Jim, and the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes were deeper.
    â€œJeff,” Minot said, “he looks about ready to take a crack at the Boches.”
    Somehow the term put them back to where they really were, two old men looking at a boy. It gave Jeffrey a curious twinge of something that was almost anger. Jim was his son, not Minot Roberts’, and what had bothered him all day came nearer until it gripped him with cold fingers.
    â€œWe’re not in this show,” he said, but Minot only laughed. His reactions were definite and undeviating, never changed by doubt.
    â€œThat’s what they said in ’16,” he answered. “Remember, Wilson kept us out of war? It’s always an open season on the Boches. If I were Jim’s age, I’d be over there right now. Let’s go, Jeff.”
    The doorman scurried out to the sidewalk and blew his whistle. “Mr. Roberts’ car, Mr. Roberts’ car, coming up.”
    Minot’s black town car rolled out of the dusk and stopped at the curb by the apartment awning. It was an addition to the picture that Jeffrey’s mind was making—Minot Roberts, sportsman and man about town, master of hounds, member of the stock exchange, clubman, World War ace. It was everything that the writers of light fiction were always looking for. It was a paragraph in a gossip column or a bit of a true confession. It was not Henry James, but it was Robert W. Chambers, and Richard Harding Davis’ Van Bibber, and Mr. Gray’s Gallops I and Gallops II. The frustrations of the doorman vanished and his job achieved a dignity and a sublimation when Minot’s car stopped at the curb.
    Minot’s chauffeur, trig and lean, with iron-gray hair, had sprung to the sidewalk. He was smiling because Pierre was an old friend of the family who knew all of Mr. Minot’s friends and who understood their values. Pierre, too, fitted into the picture. He might have been the confidential servant who had grown gray as a rat in the service of the Robertses, who had been with his master through many a scrape, who had doubtless followed just behind him when he went over the top in the Great War. Actually, Pierre was none of those things. He was just a good chauffeur with good references, but he looked them, and perhaps he thought them, too.
    â€œGood evening, sir,” he said to Jeffrey. “Good evening, Mr. Jim.”
    The instant that the door was opened, the interior of the car glowed with a soft, warm light, showing the fawn-colored upholstery and the mirror and the ash tray and the neatly folded