"Yes, yes, yes! Hell, yes! But can't you understand I'm shot to
pieces? I'm all in! I got to take care of myself! I tell you, I got
to--I'm sick of everything and everybody! I got to--"

It was she who was mature and protective now. "Why, of course! You shall
run off by yourself! Why don't you get Paul to go along, and you boys
just fish and have a good time?" She patted his shoulder--reaching up to
it--while he shook with palsied helplessness, and in that moment was not
merely by habit fond of her but clung to her strength.

She cried cheerily, "Now up-stairs you go, and pop into bed. We'll fix
it all up. I'll see to the doors. Now skip!"

For many minutes, for many hours, for a bleak eternity, he lay awake,
shivering, reduced to primitive terror, comprehending that he had won
freedom, and wondering what he could do with anything so unknown and so
embarrassing as freedom.

CHAPTER X

No apartment-house in Zenith had more resolutely experimented in
condensation than the Revelstoke Arms, in which Paul and Zilla Riesling
had a flat. By sliding the beds into low closets the bedrooms were
converted into living-rooms. The kitchens were cupboards each containing
an electric range, a copper sink, a glass refrigerator, and, very
intermittently, a Balkan maid. Everything about the Arms was excessively
modern, and everything was compressed--except the garages.

The Babbitts were calling on the Rieslings at the Arms. It was a
speculative venture to call on the Rieslings; interesting and sometimes
disconcerting. Zilla was an active, strident, full-blown, high-bosomed
blonde. When she condescended to be good-humored she was nervously
amusing. Her comments on people were saltily satiric and penetrative of
accepted hypocrisies. "That's so!" you said, and looked sheepish. She
danced wildly, and called on the world to be merry, but in the midst of
it she would turn indignant. She was always becoming indignant. Life was
a plot against her and she exposed it furiously.

She was affable to-night. She merely hinted that Orville Jones wore a
toupe, that Mrs. T. Cholmondeley Frink's singing resembled a Ford going
into high, and that the Hon. Otis Deeble, mayor of Zenith and candidate
for Congress, was a flatulent fool (which was quite true). The Babbitts
and Rieslings sat doubtfully on stone-hard brocade chairs in the small
living-room of the flat, with its mantel unprovided with a fireplace,
and its strip of heavy gilt fabric up