Pearl was teaching Lester to twirl up his spaghetti with fork and spoon, instead of draping it out of his mouth like Spanish moss. Suddenly she laughed.
“What did I tell you!” she said. “The dear old Oblique has gone blooie! Mr. Arundel called up the editor to-day and told him the Barmecide Company won't supply him with any more paper until he pays his bills. Of course that means he'll have to quit.”
Lester was touched in two vital spots: his own private hopes, and his zeal for fly-specked literature. “Shades of Frank Harris!” he cried. “If that isn't just like Arundel! Why, that man is pure and simple bourgeois! I never heard of such a thing. Has he no feeling at all for art?” Pearl laughed—the pure, musical laugh of careless girlishness, but the recording angel caught in the nimble chords a faint overtone of something else—like the tinkle of ice in a misty tumbler. “Oh, he has his own ideas about art,” she said. “He's taken to writing poetry himself. You never heard such stuff—I've been meaning to tell you. What does 'pullulate' mean?”
Lester's valiant heart, Lester's manly hands that had acted as a muff on a Riverside Drive bus, trembled and stiffened. “It 'pullulates and blooms in sultry rhyme,” she quoted gayly. “Now what do you make of that, as referring to Mr. Arundel's heart? Sultry is right, too!” Lion-hearted Harvard, oak-bosomed Balliol, and all the mature essences of manhood were needed to keep Lester calm. How had she seen these secret strains? She must have been peeping into the chief's private correspondence. He hesitated during six inches of spaghetti. “Search me!” he said. “Is it in Walter Mason?”
“No, it's his own stuff, I tell you. O beauteous rose! O shrub without a thorn!” she chanted, and her laughter popped like a champagne cork. The horrid truth burst upon him. The boss was courting the angel of the office with the very ammunition that Lester himself had furnished, and his vow of secrecy forbade him to disclose the truth. Oh, the paltry meanness of fate, the villainy of circumstance! It is impossible to describe the pangs it cost him to dissemble, cloak, disguise, and conceal the anguish he felt. But dissemble, cloak, disguise, and conceal he did, and though his heart glowed like an angry cigar stub, he reached home at last.
There he sat down at his table, and amid the healthy snores of his roommates he concocted a fine piece of literary ordnance. Late and grimly he toiled and contrived. At length he had fashioned a sonnet which would be the golden sum and substance of the previous sequence; a cry of the heart so splendidly forensic that Mr. Arundel would pounce upon it, yielding his crisp steel engraving in return. But see, the asp concealed in the basket of fruit, the adder in the woodpile! Read Lester's sonnet as an acrostic:
Over that trellis where the moon distills
My heart is climbing like a rambler rose:
You lean and listen to the whippoorwills,
Heedless of how the fragrant blossom grows!