Of course Ted had confided nothing formally as yet--but then, thought
Oliver sourly out of his own experience, he wouldn't; that was the way you
always felt; and Ted had never been a person of easy confidences. The most
he had done had been to take Oliver grimly aside from the dance they had
gone to last night and explain in one ferocious and muffled sentence
delivered half at Oliver and half at a large tree that if Hinky Selvage
didn't stop dancing with Elinor that way he, Ted, would carry him
unobtrusively behind a bush and force him to swallow most of his own front
teeth. And again Oliver, looking back as a man might to the feverish
details of a major operation, realized with cynic mirth that that was a
very favorable symptom indeed. Oh everything was going along simply finely
for Ted, if the poor fool only knew it. But that he would no more believe
of course than you would a dentist who told you he wasn't going to hurt.
People in love _were_ poor fools--damn fools--unutterably lucky,
unutterably perfect--fools.
Ted and Oliver must have one talk though before it all happened beyond
redemption and Ted started wearing that beautiful anesthetized smile and
began to concoct small kindly fatal conspiracies with Elinor and Oliver
and some nice girl.
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