Later he repeated it. Later still he found himself leaning over his desk, groping blindly about for a pen, and cursing breathlessly as though he had not a moment to lose.
"DEAR LITTLE JACQUELINE: I'm not going to see you again. Where the fool courage to write this comes from I don't know. But you will now learn that there is nothing to me after all--not even enough of positive and negative to make me worth forgiveness. And so I let it go at that. Good-bye.
In the same half blind, half dazed way, cursing something all the while, he managed to seal, stamp, and direct the letter, and get himself out of the house with it.
A club servant at the Olympian mailed it; he continued on his way to the dining room, and stumbled into a chair between Cairns and Reggie Ledyard, who were feasting noisily and unwisely with Stuyvesant Van Alstyne; and the racket and confusion seemed to help him. He was conscious of laughing and talking and drinking a great deal--conscious, too, of the annoyance of other men at other tables. Finally, one of the governors came over and very pleasantly told him to shut up or go elsewhere.
They all went, with cheerfulness unimpaired by gubernatorial admonition. There was a large dinner dance for debutantes at the Barkley's. This function they deigned to decorate with their presence for a while, Cairns and Van Alstyne behaving well enough, considering the manners of the times; Desboro, a dull fire smouldering in his veins, wandered about, haunted by a ghost whose soft breath touched his cheek.
His manners were good when he chose; they were always faultless when he was drunk. Perfectly steady on his legs, very pale, and a trifle over polite, the drunker he was the more courtly he invariably became, measuredly graceful, in speech reticent. Only his pallor and the lines about his mouth betrayed the tension.
Later, one or two men familiar with the house strolled into the distant billiard room and discovered him standing there looking blankly into space.
Ledyard, bad tempered when he had dined too well, announced that he had had enough of that debutante party:
"Look at 'em," he said to Desboro. "Horrible little fluffs just out of the incubator--with their silly brains and rotten manners, and their 'Bunny Hugs' and 'Turkey Trots' and 'Dying Chickens,' and the champagne flaming in their baby cheeks! Why, their mothers are letting 'em dance like _filles de Brasserie_! Men used to know where to go for that sort of thing----"