The Last Gentleman

arose, Kitty and her mother had put their heads together and were talking in the most animated way, Mrs. Vaught counting off items on her fingers as if she were compiling a list of some sort. Jamie put the handkerchief across his eyes.
    Rita still stood in front of the fire, feet wide apart, hands locked behind her. She watched ironically as the shivering engineer came up to get warm.
    â€œWhat’s the problem?”
    â€œMa’am?”
    â€œYou and Jamie don’t seem to be very happy about things.”
    â€œJamie told me this morning he wanted to take a trip out west—and leave immediately. I told him I would. Now I’m afraid he’s delaying the trip on my account. Don’t you think the trip would be a good idea?” He watched her closely.
    She shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. How could a delay of a few weeks matter one way or another? Perhaps it would be better to wait at least until everyone knows what he and she really wants to do. Right now I can’t help but detect a certain precipitousness in the air. I don’t think it’s a bad idea, once decisions are made, to live with them for a while, to see if perhaps they can be lived with.”
    As he watched, she set her jaw askew, made her eyes fine, and moved her chin to and fro in the web of her thumb. It was a gesture that reminded him strangely of his own father. Suddenly a thrill of recognition and of a nameless sweet horribleness ran like electricity down his spine and out along the nerves between his ribs. She was daring him. Very well, said the fine-eyed expression and the quirky (yes, legal) eyebrow. Let us see what we shall see. Perhaps I know something about you, you don’t know. Let us see if you can do what you say you want to do, stay here and get married in the regular woman’s way of getting married, marry a wife and live a life. Let us see. I dare you.
    But was he being flattered or condemned? Was she saying you know better than to stay here or you don’t have what it takes to stay? He cocked an eye at her and opened his mouth to say something, but at that moment Kitty plucked at his sleeve. “Let’s go, Tiger.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œI have a couple of calls to make. You want to come along?”
    â€œSure.”
    There had occurred between the people in the room, in the very air itself, a falling upward of things and into queer new place, like the patterns of a kaleidoscope. But it was his own Kitty who had been most mysteriously transformed. Her cheek was flushed and she swung her shoulders in her school blouse like a secretary sitting between three desks. She bustled. No longer was she the solitary girl on the park bench, as inward and watchful as he, who might wander with him through old green Louisiana, perch on the back step of the camper of an evening with the same shared sense of singularity of time and the excellence of place. No, she was Miss Katherine Gibbs Vaught and the next thing he knew she’d have her picture in the Commercial Appeal.
    â€œWhere’re we going?” he asked her, trying to keep up as she sailed through the pantry.
    â€œI am to deliver you to someone who wishes a word with you.”
    The next thing he knew, he was sitting in Kitty’s tiny Sprite, his knees about his ears as they went roaring up and over the mountain and down into the city.
    â€œWhat is this place?” he asked when they stopped in an acre or so of brand-new automobiles.
    â€œThe shop, crazy. Poppy wants to talk to you!”
    He sat blinking around him, hands on his knees. The “shop” was Mr. Vaught’s Confederate Chevrolet agency, the second largest in the world. Dozens of salesmen in Reb-colonel hats and red walking canes threaded their way between handsome Biscaynes and sporty Corvettes. By contrast with their jaunty headgear and the automobiles, which were as bright as tropical birds, the faces of the salesmen seemed heavy and anxious.
    â€œCome on,” cried Kitty, already on her way.
    They found Mr. Vaught in a vast showroom holding another acre of Chevrolets. He was standing in a fenced-off desk area talking to Mr. Ciocchio, his sales manager. Kitty introduced him and vanished.
    â€œYou see this sapsucker,” said Mr. Vaught to Mr. Ciocchio, taking the engineer by the armpit.
    â€œYes sir,” said the other, responding with a cordial but wary look. The sales manager was a big Lombard of an Italian with a fine head