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The transmitter slipped from his grasp and bounced from the table to the floor. In a minute he was on his knees, groping for it wildly.

“Hello!” he cried. “Hello—hello! Say, get Chicago back! I wasn’t through!”

The two young men were on their feet. He hung up the receiver and turned to them, his voice husky with emotion.

“I’ve been an idiot,” he said brokenly. “Quit work at sixty! Why—I must have been an idiot! I’m a young man still—I’ve got twenty good years in front of me! I’d like to see anybody send me home to die!”

The phone rang again and he took up the receiver with fire blazing in his eyes.

“Is this Jones? No, I want Mr. Jones; Rip Jones. He’s—he’s my partner.” There was a pause. “No, Chicago, that must be another party. I don’t know any Mrs. Jones—I want Mr.——”

He broke off and the expression on his face changed slowly. When he spoke again his husky voice had grown suddenly quiet.

“Why—why, Lola——”

— ◆ —

The Saturday Evening Post (12 July 1924)

When Fifi visited her Long Island aunts the first time she was only ten years old, but after she went back to New York the man who worked around the place said that the sand dunes would never be the same again. She had spoiled them. When she left, everything on Montauk Point seemed sad and futile and broken and old. Even the gulls wheeled about less enthusiastically, as if they missed the brown, hardy little girl with big eyes who played barefoot in the sand.