United States or Panama ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
He had thought himself heroic at that moment, poor, empty fool that he was, when he really had been the victim of cowardice. A brave man would have cried: "I said I'd stand by Mrs. Starratt's decision, but I'm not quite an idiot!" One other topic flamed these poor souls, seeking to kindle a warmth of sympathy for their failures. When the lamentations ceased, they talked of flight.
On the strength of Starratt's application for a change a new rate was published about the middle of May. Starratt was jubilant. Here was proof for Hilmer that his interests were being guarded and that it paid to employ an efficient broker. He flew at once to Hilmer's office. "Let me have your policies," he burst out. "I've secured a new rate for you and I want the reduction indorsed."
His friends called him a nice fellow in some ways as damning a thing as one could say about anybody and let it go at that. However, Helen Starratt's vocabulary was just as limited when it came to characterizing her conventional aims and ambitions. If, occasionally, her speculations stirred the muddy reaches of certain furtive desires, she took care that they did not become articulate.
Fred Starratt's thoughts were abrupt and purposeless, like the unsustained flights of wing-clipped birds. He knew that he was being followed, and he had a confused sense of something impending, and yet he was unable or unwilling to face the issue honestly. There were moments when he glimpsed the truth, but he seemed unmoved by these truant realizations. Was he too tired to care?
Instead, he had taken on almost the significance of a strange divinity ... an eternal questioner. At their very first meeting he had started the ferment in Fred Starratt's soul with the directness of his interrogations. He was not a man who declared his own faiths ... he merely asked you to prove yours.
Storch laughed unpleasantly. "To breed hatred!" Fred Starratt sat down again with a gesture of despair. From this moment on Fred Starratt's existence had the elements of a sleepwalking dream. He felt himself going through motions which he was powerless to direct.
In the end her choice was justified, for she had begun to undermine Helen Starratt's content with subtle purring which dripped a steady pool of disquiet. "She hasn't abandoned herself yet," she said, moving her claws restlessly. "She's too clever for that... She wants my place.
One morning, at the beginning of the second week of Fred Starratt's stay at Fairview, as he and Monet were swinging back to lunch after a brisk walk, they received orders to fall in line with the inmates of Ward 6. "Things will be better now," Monet said, with his usual air of quiet reassurance. And so it proved. Fred's first introduction was to the dining room.
Starratt voiced these fears to Brauer. "Sure he expects a rake-off," Starratt's silent partner had said. "Everybody gets it ... if they've got business enough to make it worth while." "Well, he won't get it from me," Fred returned, decisively. "I've signed my name to an agreement and that agreement will stick if I starve doing it!"
The unpleasant things in Helen Starratt's life didn't go very far beyond half-tipsy maids and impertinent butcher boys. Hilmer's experiences were not quite in the line of drawing-room anecdotes, and Starratt had seen the time when his wife would have recoiled from them with the disdainful grace of a feline shaking unwelcome moisture from its paws.
Word Of The Day