He couldn't help the natural elegance of his normal appearance, but the proprietor eyed him curiously when he announced himself as a buyer and not a seller.
"I've got a character part in a play," he explained, "and this was the only way I could think of to get the right kind of clothes."
That story increased his expenses by at least a hundred per cent; but he came out at the end of an hour with an untidy parcel containing a complete outfit of well-worn apparel that would establish the character of Tom Simons against any kind of scrutiny.
He took a taxi back to the Algonquin.
There were two telephone messages.
Miss Dexter phoned, and would call again about seven o'clock.
Miss Natello phoned.
Simon arched his brows over the second message, and smiled a little thinly before he tore it up. The ungodly were certainly working. Fundamentally he didn't mind that, but the persistence of the coverage took up the slack in his nerves. And it wasn't because he was thinking about himself.
He called Avalon's number, but there was no answer.
There are meaningless gulfs of time in real life which never occur in well-constructed stories — hours in which nothing is happening, nothing is about to happen, nothing is likely to happen, and nothing does happen. The difference is that in a story they can be so brightly and lightly skimmed over, simply by starting a fresh paragraph with some such inspired sentence as "Simon Templar went downstairs again for a drink, and Wolcott Gibbs waved to him across the lobby, and they spent a couple of congenial hours lamenting the sad standards of the current season on Broadway."