PARTISAN REVIEW
mockery of his disguise; before their homeliness, uncomposed and
self-conscious, the teeth were simply-an insult. He had a vague
sense of repetition, his day proposing its meaning in alternative
symbols.
When he had moved, after all, a little forward into the room,
the three girls stirred uneasily, rearranging themselves like bric-a-brac
that would simply not fit, but could not, for the sake of some unknown
obligation, be cast off. They had waited all day, prepared to flinch
at the inevitable offense of his glance; but they had claimed, half–
incredulously as at the granting of a prayer not even confessed, his
teeth as a warrant of acceptance. He knew that Hilda's first "Oh
!"
must have been a timid cry of hope, not the baffled shock of others
on whom he had tried this same absurd disguise.
"No," he cried silently, irked that he would not be able to make
the final gesture of removal. He trembled at the monstrous possibilities
of offense, but, "I shall wear them to the end," he decided; and
warm with the appreciation of his own subtle generosity, "They
shall never know."
Embarrassed at his long silence, Bea said, "You didn't ring."
She looked at
him
up to the moment of speech, and then, with the
air of avoiding a consummation, down at her stumpy legs.
"The door downstairs was open," Warren explained, and with
his first lie he felt established, at home.
"Mr. Pease," Hilda began, "won't you-"
"Please," he said, "that was only a pen-name, a joke. Warren
Pease. Tolstoy, get
it?
I make, I am afraid, jokes."
He looked so melancholy as he said "joke" that they did not
even dare to laugh at their own obtuseness. Bea, who had begun to
titter, pretended she had been all along only clearing her throat,
and ended in confusion, looking down at the fold of flesh that hung
like a jowl where her ankle met the counter of her shoe.
"It's poor-a poor pun," he went on, "and that you see, is
the real point. To make simply such an-an affront, would be boorish.
But to
know
it is boorish, and on the convolution of knowing it, make
it-that-"
He stopped to smile; with those teeth
it
was a gesture open and
confiding as exposing a shameful sore. "And besides, my name is
really-Plotkin
!"
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