The Trufflers. Samuel Merwin

still in overcoat and hat, was gazing with rapt eyes at a snap-shot of two girls. He laughed a little, self-consciously, at the sight of Peter and set the picture against the mirror on his side of the bureau.

      There were other pictures stuck about Hy's end of the mirror; all of girls and not all discreet. One of these, pushed aside to make room for the new one, fell to the floor. Hy let it lie.

      Peter leaned ever and peered at the snap-shot. He recognized the two girls as Betty Deane and Sue Wilde.

      “Look here,” said Peter, “where have you been?”

      “Having a dish of tea.”

      “Don't you ever work?”

      “Since friend Betty turned up, my son, I'm wondering if I ever shall.”

      Peter grunted. His gaze was centered not on Hy's friend Betty, but on the slim familiar figure at the right.

      “Just you two?”

      “Sue came in. Look here, Pete, I'm generous. We're going to cut it in half. I get Betty, you get Sue.”

      Peter, deepening gloom on his face, sat down abruptly on the bed.

      “Easy, my son,” observed Hy sagely, “or that girl will be going to your head. That's your trouble, Pete; you take 'em seriously. And believe me, it won't do!”

      “It isn't that, Hy—I'm not in love with her.”

      There was a silence while Hy removed garments.

      “It isn't that,” protested Peter again. “No, it isn't that. She irritates me.”

      Hy took off his collar.

      “Any—anybody else there?” asked Peter.

      “Only that fellow Zanin. He came in with Sue. By the way, he wants to see you. Seems to have an idea he can interest you in a scheme he's got. Talked quite a lot about it.”

      Peter did not hear all of this. At the mention of Zanin he got up suddenly and rushed off into the studio.

      Hy glanced after him; then hummed (more softly, out of a new respect for Peter) a hesitation waltz as he cut the new picture in half with the manicure scissors and put Sue on Peter's side of the bureau.

      The Worm came in, dropped coat and hat on a chair and settled himself to his pipe and the evening paper. Peter, stretched on the couch, greeted him with a grunt. Hy appeared, in undress, and attacked the piano with half-suppressed exuberance.

      It was the Worm's settled habit to read straight through the paper without a word; then to stroll out to dinner, alone or with the other two, as it happened, either silent or making quietly casual remarks that you didn't particularly need to answer if you didn't feel like it. He made no demands on you, the Worm. He wasn't trivial and gay, like Hy; or burning with inner ambitions and desires, like Peter.

      On this occasion, however, he broke bounds. Slowly the paper, not half read, sank to his knees. He smoked up a pipeful thus. His sandy thoughtful face was sober.

      Finally he spoke.

      “Saw Sue Wilde to-day. Met her outside the Parisian, and we had lunch together.”

      Peter shot a glance at him.

      The Worm, oblivious to Peter, tamped his pipe with a pencil and spoke again.

      “Been trying to make her out. She and I have had several talks. I can't place her.”

      This was so unusual—from the Worm it amounted to an outburst!—that even Hy, swinging around from the yellow keyboard, waited in silence.

      “You fellows know Greenwich Village,” the musing one went on, puffing slowly and following with his eyes the curling smoke. “You know the dope—'Oats for Women!' somebody called it—that a woman must be free as a man, free to go to the devil if she chooses. You know, so often, when these feminine professors of freedom talk to you how they over-emphasize the sex business—by the second quarter-hour you find yourself solemnly talking woman's complete life, rights of the unmarried mother, birth control; and after you've got away from the lady you can't for the life of you figure out how those topics ever got started, when likely as not you were thinking about your job or the war or Honus Wagner's batting slump. You know.”

      Hy nodded, with a quizzical look. Peter was motionless and silent.

      “You know—I don't want to knock; got too much respect for the real idealists here in the Village—but you fellows do know how you get to anticipating that stuff and discounting it before it comes; and you can't help seeing that the woman is more often than not just dressing up ungoverned desires in sociological language, that she's leaping at the chance to experiment with emotions that women have had to suppress for ages. Back of it is the new Russianism they live and breathe—to know no right or wrong, trust your instincts, respond to your emotions, bow to your desires. … Well, now, here's Sue Wilde. She looks like a regular little radical. And acts it. Breaks away from her folks—lives with the regular bunch in the Village—takes up public dancing and acting—smokes her cigarettes—knows her Strindberg and Freud—yet … well, I've dined with her once, lunched with her once, spent five hours in her apartment talking Isadora Duncan as against Pavlowa, even walked the streets half a night arguing about what she calls the Truth … and we haven't got around to 'the complete life' yet.”

      “How do you dope it out?” asked Hy.

      “Well”—the Worm deliberately thought out his reply—“I think she's so. Most of 'em aren't so. She's a real natural oasis in a desert of poseurs. Probably that's why I worry about her.”

      “Why worry?” From Hy.

      “True enough. But I do. It's the situation she has drifted into, I suppose. If she was really mature you'd let her look out for herself. It's the old he protective instinct in me, I suppose. The one thing on earth she would resent more than anything else. But this fellow Zanin …”

      He painstakingly made a smoke ring and sent it toward the tarnished brass hook on the window-frame. It missed. He tried again.

      Peter stirred uncomfortably, there on the couch. “What has she told you about Zanin?” he asked, desperately controlling his voice.

      “She doesn't know that she has told me much of anything. But she has talked her work and prospects. And the real story comes through. Just this afternoon since I left her, it has been piecing itself together. She is frank, you know.”

      Peter suppressed a groan. She was frank! “Zanin is in love with her. He has been for a year or more. He wrote Any Street for her, incorporated some of her own ideas in it. He has been tireless at helping her work up her dancing and pantomime. Why, as near as I can see, the man has been downright devoting his life to her, all this time. It's rather impressive. But then, Zanin is impressive.”

      Peter broke out now. “Does he expect to marry her—Zanin?”

      “Marry her? Oh, no.”

      “'Oh, no!' Good God then—”

      “Oh, come, Pete, you surely know Zanin's attitude toward marriage. He has written enough on the subject. And lectured—and put it in those little plays of his.”

      “What is his attitude?”

      “That marriage is immoral. Worse than immoral—vicious. He has expounded that stuff for years.”

      “And what does she say to all this?” This question came from Hy, for Peter was speechless.

      “Simply that he doesn't rouse any emotional response in her. I'm not sure that she isn't a little sorry he doesn't. She would be honest you know. And that's the thing about Sue—my guess about her, at least—that she won't approach love as an experiment or an experience. It will have to be the real thing.”

      He tried again, in his slow calm way, to hang a smoke ring on the