What is your opinion?"
Mr. Wrenn turned to Istra for protection. She promptly
announced: "Mr. Wrenn absolutely agrees with me. By the way,
he's doing a big book on the recrudescence of Kipling, after his
slump, and--"
"Oh, come off, now! Kipling! Blatant imperialist, anti-Stirner!"
cried Carson Haggerty, kicking out each word with the assistance
of his swinging left foot.
Much relieved that the storm-center had passed over him, Mr.
Wrenn sat on the front edge of a cane-seated chair, with the
magazines between his hands, and his hands pressed between his
forward-cocked knees. Always, in the hundreds of times he went
over the scene in that room afterward, he remembered how cool
and smooth the magazine covers felt to the palms of his
flattened hands. For he associated the papery surfaces with the
apprehension he then had that Istra might give him up to the
jag-toothed grin of Carson Haggerty, who would laugh him out of
the room and out of Istra's world.
He hated the poetic youth, and would gladly have broken all of
Carson's teeth short off.
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