Jock missed the second football game of the season; he spent that afternoon in New York with Yvonne. She had telephoned him the night before, suggesting that he do this. "Really, Jock Hamill, I'm not at all in the mood to travel all the way out there tomorrow. You come here instead."
In any other girl, this calm change of plan without any sufficient reason would have enraged him. In Yvonne it was merely divertingly characteristic. Jock acceded to it with scarcely a protest.
And so they sat together on a huge black velvet divan that faced the fireplace in Yvonne's living room. The window shades were drawn, giving an effect of twilight at three o'clock, and here and there about the the room lamps diffused a lovely blushing glow. Yvonne leaned against a pile of cushions that Jock thought must have been chosen just to match her. A russet one, like her hair; a green one, like her tea gown; and one so precisely the hue of her gray eyes that they seemed like sample pieces of its material. She wore tiny tall-heeled slippers with French toes, and no stockings, and her legs were as delicately creamy and flawless as the skin of her neck and arms.
For an hour, while the fire blazed at their feet and their cigarettes filled the room with a thin fine mist, they talked generalities. A long dreamy lazy hour, full of a brooding peace. Jock felt drugged with it. He felt that he wanted it never to end. . . . Firelight and Yvonne. Little quiet-leaping flames, and Yvonne's voice, like a lullaby. And Yvonne's beauty to look at, to drink up with the eyes. . . . Incredible to remember that somewhere men were playing football and
