“Who did these? You?” and then presently, “Here, this isn’t fair. You’ve been trespassing in my city.”
Then suddenly he paused, flushed, and became embarrassed. He became—as she would have said afterward—George the Third. He spoke of the Elevated Railroad’s limited appropriation for promotion, of the peculiar problems of transportation publicity, asked what was her usual price for art work, took her name and address.... Perhaps George the Fourth would have died then and there, perished of cholera infantum at the age of half an hour, never been heard of again except on a tablet in the imaginary cathedral on Brooklyn Bridge ... but as she left the office she shook so with purely nervous elation she had to stop by the brass-rimmed letter chute in the hall. She was wishing she had the courage to go back and ask him how soon the check could come through (Will he mail it here? she thought. Oh, blessed chute!) ... and then he came hurrying round the corner after her.
“Look here,” he said, with pink-browed uncertainty, “I can’t let you go away like this. The family’s off in the country. I’m devilish lonely. Will you have dinner with me and we can talk about New York?”
She was too amused and exultant to answer promptly. But George the Fourth, looking anxiously from his bassinette, need not have been so afraid she was going to refuse. Do artists who have just made their first real sale decline a square meal?
“We’ll ride uptown in the L, to celebrate,” he pleaded. “There’s a bit where it turns right into the sunset for a few blocks; if you stand on the front platform it’s corking. And I know a place where we can get a bottle of asti spumante....”
The lighted candles of the Italian basement where they dined. At first his shyness had come back upon him: he seemed to feel that taking any one but Phyllis out to dinner was an incredible truancy. Then, as they looked anxiously at each other, some element in the blood broke free. His mind came running to her like a child, like a boy lost in a world of tall stone buildings and clamouring typewriters. His poor shivered ideas just fitted into the fractured edges of her own. He had been well drilled, but there was in him a little platoon that had broken away from the draft and enlisted in the Foreign Legion.
“You know,” he said, “I never talked like this to any one before. What is there about you that makes one say what he really thinks? My mind feels as though someone had stolen its clothes while it was in bathing. How will it be able to go back to work to-morrow?”
Warm golden candlelight and cold golden wine: the little table in the corner was a yellow island in a sea of cigarette smoke, a sunny silence in the comforting hum of other people’s chatter. In her own loneliness she saw his mind like the naked footprint on Crusoe’s beach.
There must have been another footprint there too: the footprint of a mischievous godling who runs the beaches of the world as naked as Man Friday.
“The ideas I folded neatly and hid under a stone” (she could still hear him saying it, there was something delightfully heavy in his way of saying stone), “the ideas I thought you have to leave behind when you go bathing in the river of life, I think maybe I shall go back and look under that stone for them and see if they aren’t the most important of all. I thought they were just clothes. Maybe they were my bathing suit.”