He meditated, ignoring my jocularity.
“It was a good many years ago,” he said at last; “before you knew me. When I first came to town, you know, I had a fine ambition to be a writer. I had just a little money, so I shut myself up in a hall room at the top of a cheap lodging-house on Seventy-fifth Street, hired a typewriter, and set about to butt my bead against all the walls that hem in the beginner.
“It was one of those old four-story dwellings that are now mostly boarding-houses, and it was run by a good-hearted widow who would let her rooms only to men, because she said they were less trouble than women. Her house was clean and incredibly cheap, and almost all the lodgers were young fellows like myself—students, or starveling artists, or chaps with literary ambitions. That was how I had heard of the place, through another fellow who lived there and had built up a little sort of coterie in the house. He was Black-more. You know his name; he gave up art long ago. He's now the art editor of the Mother, Home, and Heaven Magazine.
“Mrs. Vesey, our landlady, was quite a character. I was always rather a favourite with her, because the very first day I came to her house I happened to find her cat, which had wandered away some days before, leaving her disconsolate. The cat's name, I remember, was Nemo. She had called it so because, with that admirable virginity of mind that one finds only in a childless married woman, she was uncertain of the animal's sex. Anyway, it was a fine big creature, and the apple of Mrs. Vesey's pie. She talked so much about it that we used to chaff her a good deal on the subject, and say that we thought it was going to have kittens, and all that sort of thing. Blackmore used to say, remembering the title of some idiotic melodrama he had seen, that it was 'Neither Maid, Wife, nor Widow.' He was right, for it was the kind of cat that is not likely to be either a father or a mother without a miracle. But I don't want to be indelicate. I only mention Nemo because it was through him that I first talked with Gloria.
“The first day I was at Mrs. Vesey's I heard her groaning about the vanished cat. That evening I went out to supper, feeling rather lonely, and dropped in at an eccentric-looking little restaurant on Amsterdam Avenue. It was called Larsen's Physical Culture Chophouse, and I have never seen a more amusing place. Old man Larsen was a Swede, and all the Scandinavian fads ran riot in his head—vegetarian food, for instance. He didn't absolutely condemn meat, for he would serve it if you insisted, but all his joy was in weird combinations of calory, protose, and vitamine, or whatever those things are called. Bean “cutlets,” and protose “steak” that turned out, on examination, to be made of chopped walnuts and lentils, and the “Thousand-Calory Combination Dinner,” of which he made a specialty. When you sat down, if you were a regular customer, old Larsen would come round and look you over and diagnose from your complexion the kind and quantity of calories you needed for that meal, and would give you combinations of spinach croquettes and lentil pie that he warranted would purge the blood and compose the mind. On the walls were charts of Swedish exercises and systems of calisthenics, and he sold a little pamphlet that he himself had written telling how to be strong and merry and full of physique.
“Well, to come back to my first visit to Larsen's restaurant. I hadn't been in there many minutes before I noticed the girl at the cashier's desk. My, my, what a girl! My table was close to her little throne, and I couldn't help watching her out of the end of my eye. I wondered if she was raised entirely on protose and lentils, for I have never seen anything so gloriously and vitally physical in my life. Great, bold blue eyes, and crisp, sparkling golden hair, and blood that spoke delicately through her skin, and a figure—well, just our old friend of Melos over again, that lively combination of grace and strength. She was just curves and waves and athletic softness—the kind of creature that makes your arms tingle, you know. No corset, I suppose. In the old man's booklet on physical culture he defended the gymnastic doctrine that women should develop what he called a muscle corset by bending and swaying from the hips a thousand times a day. He said it must be done—well, au naturel, in front of an open window in one's bedroom in the morning. I'd be ashamed to admit that we fellows at Mrs. Vesey's used to set our alarm clocks at half-past six to go round the corner to Amsterdam Avenue——”
Dulcet paused a while and watched the river pensively.
“But about the cat,” I reminded him presently.
“Yes,” he said. “Well, that first night I was at the chop-house I noticed a very fine, fat cat browsing about under the tables. I was amused at the corpulence of the animal. I said to myself that a cat as large as that must surely get some meat somewhere, because, while vegetarian protose food may be all right for Swedes, a cat is a realist in the matter of carnal meals. And when I went to the desk to pay my check, wanting some excuse to get into talk with the superb Gloria—who was, of course, the old man's daughter—I remarked on the sleek, healthy appearance of her cat.