But he was not so obtuse as to fail of seeing the near future. The
Germans were proving a right hard nut to crack. It might
be--remotely--that a man would have no choice in the matter of fighting.
He saw that cloud on the horizon. Sometimes he wished that he could
muster up a genuine enthusiasm for this business of war. He saw men who
had it and wondered privately how they came by it.
If he could have felt it an imperative duty laid upon him, that would
have settled certain matters out of hand. Chief among these would have
been the problem of Sophie Carr.
Sophie eluded and mystified him. Not wholly in a physical
sense--although, to be exact, she did become less accessible in a purely
physical sense. But it went deeper than that. During the eighteen months
following Thompson's motor-sales debut he never succeeded in
establishing between them the same sense of spiritual communion that he
had briefly glimpsed those few minutes in Carr's home on the way he
opened his salesroom.
There was Tommy, for instance. Tommy was far closer to Sophie Carr than
he, Thompson, could manage to come, no matter how he tried. He and Tommy
were friends. They had apartments in the same house. They saw each other
constantly.
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