“My God!” said Harry. “Think how many starving cubists you could endow on that! There'll be a riot in Greenwich Village.”
“Pity the poor bartenders on a night like this!” cried Jack. Then they went to Browne's chop-house for dinner. After a three-finger steak and several beakers of dog's nose, Lester was readily persuaded to enounce the first number of his sonnet sequence, which had accreted or (as its author expressed it) nucleolated, while he was walking home from the office.
“Sonnet, in the Petrarchan mode, item No. 1,” he proclaimed:
Upon a trellis, bending toward the south,
I set my heart, a yearning rose, to climb;
It pullulates and blooms in sultry rhyme,
It spires and speeds aloft, in spite of drouth.
And seeking for that sweeter rose, your mouth,
That beckons from some balcony sublime,
It heeds no whit the tick-tack-tock of Time