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, reminiscent of the days when the South patronized Newport, and turned into Bellevue Avenue—past shops with names familiar to Fifth Avenue, past a villa with bright-eyed owls on the gateposts, past many large, silent houses and walled gardens. 

 Prev. P 9/53 next