Keeban

The quick, quiet unlocking and then the closing of the hall door on the floor below told me that Jerry had come in; so I sat up, roused as I always was when I felt him about. He put life into any place,—even into an Astor Street marble mansion in the somnolence of two-thirty on a morning after everybody else has gone to bed.

Since my light was on, although it was only a shaded reading lamp and although the double blinds before my window must have prevented more than the merest glint outside, I was sure Jerry had noticed from the street that I was awake; for he notices everything; and everything bears to him a meaning which he has the clear head and the nervous energy to make out. I never realized, till I began analyzing Jerry, how much more you need than a brain for thinking; to get anywhere, you must have a sort of habitual energy to tackle incidents and carry them in your mind beyond the first, simple registry of the observed fact.

Take that evening we came home late together, when my cousin Janet with her new husband was stopping with us. They’d arrived only that day, and Jerry hadn’t seen Janet since she married and he had never met Lew Hollings at all or heard anything about him except that they were married and were to visit us. It was a very hot night and they’d gone to their rooms early to rest from the train. We’d given them our best guest rooms,—the pair of bedrooms on the third floor in front with a dressing room in between. I noticed, as we approached the house, that the dressing room light was burning and the bedrooms both were dark with the windows open. Somebody’d forgotten the light; that’s all it meant to me. Jerry looked up at the house.

“Why, that’s too bad, Steve!” he said. “That” was so plain to him that it didn’t occur to him that he needed to explain when he finished. “I thought Janet and Hollings were getting along all right.”