Ann was furious.
“Well, you're the only one I ever paid any attention to,” she said, blazing at him. “I'm sorry you think I've cheapened myself. I guess I have, by letting you interfere with my affairs.”
She slipped the ring from her finger, and thrust it at him. Arthur saw, too late, what he had done. She listened in scornful silence to his miserable attempts to console her, which were doubly handicapped by the old waiter hovering near. She was still adamant while he took her up town. The only thing she said was when she reached the door of her apartment.
“I don't want you to cheapen yourself. You needn't come any more.”
By this time Arthur also was thoroughly angry. The next morning he went away on his business trip, realizing for the first time that he who has the pass key to a human heart treads among dangerous explosives.
IV
How different the little room in the Planet office looked to Ann when she returned, with a sick heart, to her work the next morning. Everything was just the same—the geranium on its windowledge, that seemed to survive both the eddying hot air from the steampipes beneath it and the daily douche of iced drinking water; the noisily ticking inaccurate little clock; the dusty typewriter. All were the same, and there was the pile of morning letters from Love's battered henchmen. To office boy and casual reporter Ann herself seemed the usual cheerful charmer with her crisp little white collar and dark, alluring hair. Her swift, capable hands sped over the pile of letters, slitting the envelopes and sorting the outcries into some classification of her own. Outwardly nothing had altered, but everything seemed to have lost its meaning. What a desolate emptiness gaped beneath the firm routine of her daily life. She was struck by the irony of the fact that the only one in the office who seemed to notice that something was amiss was the one person whom she disliked—Mr. Sikes. He came in about something or other, and then stayed, looking at her intently.
“You look sick,” he said. “What's the matter, is the love feast getting on your nerves?”
With a queer twitching at the corners of her mouth, she forced herself to say some trifling remark. He leaned over her and put his hand on hers. She caught the strong cigarry whiff of his clothes, which sickened her.
“Too much love in the abstract,” he said, insinuatingly. “What you need is a little love in the concrete.”