“'Oh, it's not ours,' she said. 'It came in here yesterday. I don't know whose he is.'
“I'll bet I know whose it is,” I said.
I told her that Mrs. Vesey, who ran the bachelor lodging-house on Seventy-Fifth Street, had lost her Nemo. She listened with interest, those thrilling blue eyes sizing me up in a keen, humorous way.
“'I shouldn't wonder it's hers,' she said.
“Welcoming any pretext for prolonging the discussion, I borrowed the phone at Gloria's elbow, and, studying the heart-rending curves of her chin and cheek and throat, I called up Mrs. Vesey and told her I thought I had found her pet. Mrs. Vesey hurried round to the restaurant, and swept up the vagabond Nemo with cries of joy into her lean and affectionate bosom. Nemo purred, and I escorted Mrs. Vesey home, recapitulating in my mind the perfect contours of the girl's heavenly form. My enthusiasm was even such that when the other men came in I could not refrain from telling them all about her. I saw that I had made a mistake, for instantly Blackmore swore he would get her to sit for him.
“Of course, from that time on, the Physical Culture Chophouse became the nightly haunt of our little party. The other men had seen it many times, but the vegetarian threats in the window had frightened them away. But now, none of us dared to be absent very many dinners, for fear the rest would gain some advantage with the girl. I cannot give you any conception of the humorous glamour of that time unless I insist that she was the most superbly luscious thing I have ever glimpsed; and one sees a good many covetable creatures on the streets of New York. Some of them said she was cold; that in spite of all the nutritious algebra printed on old Larsen's menus (he used to put down all sorts of preposterous formulas about starch, and albumen, and phosphorus, and proteids, and so on)—she was lacking in calories. But I know that when we sat at table, and she came round to ask if everything was all right, and leaned over us with her clear eyes, as blue as a special-delivery stamp, and that cream-white neck, and the faint glimmer of a blue ribbon shining through the hilly slopes of her blouse——-Oh, well, Ben, we were young, and we ate red meat for lunch, anyway.
“I guess old man Larsen, who spent most of his time in the kitchen, encouraged her to kid us along, for he never seemed to mind our open admiration of his daughter. He probably saw that she was a bigger business asset than any number of calory charts. Every now and then he would come out and chin with us, for our party became a nightly event in the café. Before long we had sampled every kind of vegetarian combination on the list, and had him busy inventing new ones. We used to ask him if he had raised a girl like that on nothing but vegetables, and he would laugh and swear that Gloria had never tasted blood until she was sixteen. It seemed queer to us that the restaurant wasn't full of her suitors. I should have thought, with a girl like her, they'd have been standing in line waiting for a look at her. I suppose that people who feed on nothing but vegetables are rather puny in such matters. It's an odd thing, but I've always noticed that most of the people who frequent these crank physical-culture and dietetic eating-places are a queer, sick-looking lot—youths with rolling Adam's apples, and sallow, soup-stained girls. Certainly our little gang, so very jovial and fancy-free, made a quaint contrast to most of the patrons of the house. In a few days we felt as if we owned the place, and had the old man slide two tables together just underneath Gloria's cash register, where we met every evening for dinner.
“As for Larsen, he was a crank on many subjects but he was no fool. He was an athletic, erect fellow with a bristling gray moustache and cropped hair and a forcible gray eye. On the wall was a huge photo of him in a kind of Sandow pose, with a leopard-skin apron round his middle, showing terrific knotty biceps and back muscles. Gloria told us that at one time he had been a physical instructor in the Swedish army, and the head of a Turnverein, or something of that sort. There was a certain physical and gymnastic candour about him that amused us. He was awfully proud of Gloria, whom he had raised himself (being a widower) according to his own hygienic and athletic principles. After we had all bought his booklets, and promised to take up his system of calisthenics, he became quite chummy and showed us a lot of photographs of Gloria at different ages, doing her gymnastic exercises, beginning as a little plump Venus and ending as a stunning profile in tights. We tried to maintain an attitude of merely scientific detachment toward those pictures, admiring them only as connoisseurs of physical culture; but we ended by begging him for copies, insisting that they would be a useful guide to us in our own private exercising. But Larsen said he was keeping them to illustrate a new enlarged edition of his physical-culture book. We told him that it would sell a million copies, and I think we all volunteered to act as selling-agents for the book. Annette Kellermann and Susanna Cocroft, we cried, were scarecrows compared to Gloria.
“To all this banter Gloria would listen calmly and unembarrassed, for she had a magnificent unconsciousness of her own superb allure. We would each try to get a moment alone with her to describe the exercises we were taking, and to ask her advice about our muscular development. I remember that Blackmore, after secret practice that we had not suspected, took the wind out of our sails one evening when some of us were bragging of our accomplishment in bending and touching the floor while standing on tiptoe. He jumped up and caught hold of the lintel of the doorway, and chinned himself on it a dozen times or so. We were all crestfallen by this feat until Gloria came forward—all the other customers had gone home—and did the same thing about twenty times. She went back to her counter with a heavenly flush of pride, while Blackmore dashed to a table and did a little sketch of her from memory, with the lovely lines of her figure silhouetted against the doorway.
“But it was I who was first to think of the subtlest compliment that any one could pay her, which was to ask the privilege of feeling her biceps. And what an arm she had! Not a great, fleshy, flabby washerwoman's limb, but the rippling marble of a Greek statue brought to warm life! Blackmore used to sit at meal-times neglecting his protose steak and making sketches of her while she wasn't looking. The best I could do was write verses about her. And while she played no favourites, I think she really gave me a little the inside track, because I talked physical culture with her more seriously than the others, who tried to make love to her a little too baldly.