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Brad's going had been so futile! So unnecessary! It wasn't right that a man like that should go for a thing like that. . . . After the first chaotic hours he had reduced the situation to its fundamentals: Brad had died so that Eunice might drive a shiny new coupé and wrap about herself the skins of little animals.

In the white heat of this realization, pity for Eunice shriveled instantly, and he looked upon her with contempt and loathing. If Brad had not said, "Take care of her, be good to her," he would never voluntarily have seen her again. As it was, he paid punctual duty calls at the bungalow, and pretended to comfort a grief that seemed to him now as false as was his solicitude for it. Inwardly, he was unmoved and angry. Everything she did and said he thought smacked of the theatrical . . . a widow in a movie, weeping glycerin tears. He wanted to cry, "Hypocrite!" all the time. He wanted to snarl it into her face. "Hypocrite! Go ahead and bawl because he's gone. You sent him!"

Her mourning particularly infuriated him. It was so chic. Bereavement made enticing. She affected black gowns cut to hug the breast and hips suggestively, and little black hats with abbreviated veils that made her eyes look big and wistful and her lids transparent. Bones Allen summed her up one day in a single sentence: "She may be sad, but she's nifty about it."

Between Jock and Eunice the cause of Brad's suicide was tacitly understood but never discussed. Jock was aware that Brad had written her a letter also, and that she knew. But she never mentioned it and he, taking his cue from her, refrained also from mentioning it. Nor did he divulge it to anyone else. When they asked him—and many asked him—why Brad had killed himself, he replied only, "I don't know." Nothing could have dragged the secret from him. It was Brad's