The Beauty and the Bolshevist

								

a word of advice as she put his bag into his hand.
“Don’t take any nonsense. Remember you’re every bit as good as they.
Only don’t, for goodness’ sake, Mr. Ben, talk any of your ideas to
them. A rich man like Mr. Cord wouldn’t like that.”
Ben laughed. “How would you like me to bring you home a lovely heiress
of my own?” he said.
She took a thread off his coat. “Only don’t let her come interfering in
my kitchen,” she said, and hurried him away. He had a good deal of
courage, but he had not enough to tell Nora he was going to Newport to
stop her darling’s marriage.
The Newport boat gets to Newport about two o’clock in the morning, and
experienced travelers, if any such choose this method of approach, go
on to Fall River and take a train back to Newport, arriving in time for
a comfortable nine-o’clock breakfast. But Ben was not experienced, and
he supposed that when you took a boat for Newport and reached Newport
the thing to do was to get off the boat.
It had been a wonderful night on the Sound, and Ben had not been to
bed, partly because, applying late on a Friday evening, he had not been
able to get a room, but partly because the moon and the southerly
breeze and the silver shores of Long Island and the red and white
lighthouses had been too beautiful to leave. Besides, he had wanted to
think out carefully what he was going to say to his brother.
To separate a man from the woman he loves, however unwisely, has some
of the same disadvantages as offering a bribe—one respects the other
person less in proportion as one succeeds. What, Ben said to himself,
could he urge against a girl he did not know? Yet, on the other hand,
if he had known her, his objections would have seemed regrettably
personal. Either way, it was difficult to know what to say. He wondered
what Cord had said, and smiled to think that here was one object for
which he and Cord were co-operating—only Cord would never believe it.
That was one trouble with capitalists—they always thought themselves so
damned desirable. And Ben did not stop to inquire how it was that
capitalists had gained this impression.
On the pier he looked about for David, but there was no David. Of
course the boy had overslept, or hadn’t received his telegram—Ben said
this to himself, but somehow the vision of David comfortably asleep in
a luxurious bed in the Cords’s house irritated him.
His meditations were broken in upon by a negro boy with an open hack,
who volunteered to “take him up for fifty cents.” It sounded
reasonable. Ben got in and they moved slowly down the narrow pier, the
horses’ hoofs clumping lazily on the wooden pavement. Turning past the
alley of Thames Street, still alight at three o’clock in the morning,
Ben stopped at the suggestion of his driver and left his bag at a
hotel, and then they went on up the hill, past the tower of the
Skeleton in Armor, past old houses with tall, pillared porticoes,