At this moment Lester was busy multiplying twenty by fifty-two, and adding sixty, and he did not attempt to put Laura's friend right in the eyes of his companions.
The next morning, at the office, Lester took occasion to stroll over to the corner where Miss Denver was tickling the keys. Her delicious, able fingers flashed like the boreal aurora; the incomparable smoothness of her neck and throat fascinated him; her clear, blue-washed gray eyes startled him with their merry archness. Wambling inwardly, he met her gaze as coolly as he might.
“Come to Moretti's to-night?” he asked.
“I'm sorry; I've got a date to-night.”
He ached in spirit. “To-morrow night?”
She hesitated a moment, tapping the desk with a rosy finger nail. Then her face brightened. “I'd love to.”
As he returned to his desk and the dull routine of writing press notes for Petunia Veal's latest novel, he uttered a phrase that he had caught from Harry Hanover. It was the first sign of his emancipation from Mallarmé and the Oxford Movement, for certainly that phrase had never been heard on the quilted lawns of Balliol: “She's a prize package, all right, all right!”
Ten days elapsed. All six sonnets had been delivered and paid for, and Mr. Arundel had bargained for a few extra rondeaux, at five dollars each.
Antipasto, minestrone, breadsticks, force-meat balls, and here we are again at the spaghetti and Hackensack Chianti. Lester had mailed his MS. on “Clara Tice and the Pleinaerists of Greenwich Village” to the Oblique Review that afternoon, and had calculated that the editors could not in any decency offer him less than fifty—or perhaps forty—dollars for it. This, added to 20 by 52 plus 60 plus the rondeaux and other probable increments, would certainly support two in a garret for some time. He also had hopes of selling some obscenarios for the movies. Pearl would probably want to go on with her work, for a while at any rate. She was so independent! But those clear eyes of hers, like a March sky with teasings of April in it, how tender and laughing they were! A few nights ago they had taken a long bus ride together, and she had forgotten her muff. She let him warm her hands instead. He went home that night feeling strong enough to bite lamp-posts in two, and had waked up Jack and Harry to put them right about Petrarch.