Radio Mirror: The Magazine of Radio Romances (Jan-June 1943)

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Cannot affect waving of hair. Lasting — docs not wash out. Just brush or comb it in. One application Imparts desired color. Simply retouch as new gray appears. Easy to prove by tinting a test lock of your hair. 60c and (1.05 (5 times as much) at drug or toilet, counters on a money-backguarautce. Get BROWNATONE today. 64 If Love Were All Continued from page 22 taken that car apart so many times, adding some new gadget or adjustment every time he put it together again, that it no longer deserved its original maker's trade-mark; but it could almost do what Gene laughingly claimed for it — come when he whistled. Gene had a way with machinery. Before that rainy spring night, when Gene and I went out together we had, as often as not, gone with other couples or with a crowd. Now, by an unvoiced consent, we wanted to be alone — even though being alone together brought us as much pain as pleasure. It isn't easy to deny the hot eagerness of love, to forget that the sweetest of kisses is by rights only a prelude to a greater sweetness. And yet, I suppose it was easier for me than for Gene. "Oh, Arda," he'd whisper after he'd held me in his arms for a kiss that it seemed should never end. "I love you so much — why — " And he would leave the question unfinished, while I, torn between my terrible desire to give him everything and anything he wanted and my deep conviction that to do so would be wrong, stiffened and drew unwillingly away from his beseeching lips. TPHIS could not go on, I knew in -* my heart. But never once, when Gene told me he loved me, did he speak of marriage. It wasn't that I wanted him to speak of it. Marriage frightened me — but so did love without marriage. I knew I would have to make a choice, but Gene should have offered me that choice and he did not. "When summer is over ..." I thought, childishly setting up for myself a barrier in time. But it is strange that I should have selected the end of summer. If you were like me, you knew that the radio was devoting more time than usual to news broadcasts, and that's all you knew, until all at once Europe was at war. And this fact you found it very hard to believe. Yet almost at once, the war had its effect on my life. If I haven't said much, up to now, about Tim Gorman, Gene's older brother, it's because, up to the time the Germans marched into Poland, he wasn't very important to me. Oh, I knew him well enough, naturally, but he was just Gene's brother — years older than either of us, serious, and not at all interesting. The truth is that Tim had always seemed older than he was, even when he was sixteen and Gene ten — which was the year Mr. and Mrs. Gorman were killed in an automobile accident and Tim was left to be Gene's almost sole support. There was a small estate, but the courts — or somebody, I never really understood who — put it in trust so that there was only a little income. Tim went to work that same year in Bradford's grocery store, and he'd worked there ever since. Luckily, the house where the Gormans lived had belonged to them, so the boys didn't have to move. Tim made an arrangement with a motherly widow, Mrs. Wilton, to come and live with him and Gene, and the three of them got along very well. "Tim's a fine boy," Dad used to say. "Gene doesn't appreciate all the things his brother's sacrificed for him. Why, Tim had one of the best scholastic records any Briarton High student ever rolled up, and he could have gone on to college and really made something of himself. But he gave all that up, just to take care of Gene. A fine, honest, young fellow." This was all true, and I knew it, and I admired Tim; but you need more than admiration for friendship. Whenever we saw each other we had a hard time thinking of things to say. He seemed almost middle-aged to me, and I was sure I seemed childish to him. So I was surprised one night toward the middle of September, when the telephone rang and it wasn't Gene, but Tim. "There's something I want to talk over with you, Arda," he explained in his slow, careful way. "And since Gene's out in back, tinkering on that jalopy of his, I figured you might not be busy tonight. Can I come over?" "Of course," I said at once. "I'll be out on the front porch." While I waited, curled up in one corner of the new red-and-white striped glider we'd bought that summer, I wondered what on earth Tim wanted to talk about. He came up the steps, and the glider creaked as he sat down beside me. Tim was bigger than Gene. Gene was lithe and quick, but Tim was solidly muscled, broad in the shoulder from years of handling heavy crates of groceries. He was handsome, too, it struck me suddenly, in an ordinary sort of way. Not Gene's way, which was something special. ¥ GUESS you're wondering what -*■ I wanted to see you about," he said hesitantly, after we had exchanged polite and pointless remarks about the weather and my parents' health — the kind of remarks which, until now, had always been the only ones Tim and I could find for each other. "Yes, a little," I smiled. "You sounded as if it were awfully important." "It is," he said simply. At first I felt like smiling again at his solemnity — and then, suddenly, I didn't feel like smiling at all. I knew that whatever Tim was going to say, it was important. "This is a funny thing for me to be doing," he went on after a minute. "Maybe you'll think I'm butting into something that isn't any of my business. I'll try to explain, so you don't see it that way. But first, I've got to ask you a pretty personal kind of question — you are in love with Gene, aren't you?" "I — " But I didn't resent this, coming from Tim, and I didn't feel any wish to avoid answering. "Yes, Tim," I said. "I guess I am." "That's what I thought," he said evenly. "It's been — pretty plain that you were, these last few months, but I wanted to hear you say so." His gray eyes, darker than Gene's, were steady on my face. "Then here's what I've been thinking — why don't the two of you get married?" I couldn't go on looking at him as RADIO MIRROR