“Very attractive,” said Vincelle.
“Did you ever see anyone like her?” he pursued.
Vincelle admitted that he hadn’t.
“I don’t mind telling you I’m pretty hard hit,” said Pendleton.
This was something his friend had very much wished not to hear.
“What about her?” he asked, briefly.
Pendleton groaned.
“She’s such a little flirt!” he said. “Of course, I’m not in a position to marry now, anyway. I’m not making enough to keep myself. And by the time I can ask her ... with all these fellows hanging round her all the time ... Lord!”
Vincelle considered this frankness unmanly and indecorous. Never would he have admitted a liking for a young lady until he was certain that she returned it.
They crossed on the ferry, standing outside in the fine, cold air, on the deck of the ark-shaped old boat. They reached New York and just caught the Wall Street ferry and at last disembarked in the familiar air of Brooklyn. They both lived in the august Columbia Heights district, Pendleton in a house which was respectable, but no more, and Vincelle in a fine one, on a corner, with a garden quite twenty feet wide. He respected this garden, because it represented extra property and also because it kept them aloof from all neighbors; through the high iron fence could be seen its winter desolation, a complete and woeful barrenness. At the best of times it was hardly an oasis, nothing grew in it, and nothing was intended to grow in it, except a wretched ancient wistaria, two bushes of Japanese holly and a tall shrub, dry and dead. The common use of the garden was as a place in which the house plants could stand, the rubber trees and palms and orange trees in tubs. Every Spring old Mrs. Vincelle bought a number of potted geraniums and had them planted in a certain bed where they blossomed, mangily, for a month or two.