Immediately after, on all-fours, his face screwed up for scrutiny and the back of his neck hotly ridden with crimson, Mr. Pelz leaned after.
"Roody—what?"
"Heads!"
Where Riverside Drive reaches its rococo climax of the twelve-thousand-dollar-a-year and twelve-story-high apartment-house de luxe and duplex, and six baths divided by fourteen rooms is equal to solid-marble comfort, Elsinore Court, the neurotic Prince of Denmark and Controversy done in gilt mosaics all over the foyer, juts above the sky-line, and from the convex, rather pop-eyed windows of its top story, bulges high and wide of view over the city.
From one of these windows, looking north, Rudolph Pelz, by the holding-aside of a dead weight of pink brocade and filet lace, could gaze upon a sweep of Hudson River that flowed majestically between the great flank of the city and the brobdingnagian Palisades.
After a day when he had unerringly directed the great swinging crane of this or that gigantic transaction it had a laving effect upon him—this view of sure and fluent tide that ran so perpetually into infinitude.
Yet for Mr. Pelz to attempt to articulate into words this porcelain-thin pillar of emotions was to shatter it into brittle bits.
"Say, Rosie, ain't that a view for you? That's how it is with life—a river that rises with getting born and flows into death, and the in-between is life and—and—"
"Roody, will you please hurry for sup—dinner? Do you want Feist to arrive with you not yet dressed?"
Mr. Pelz turned then into an interior that was as pink and as silk as the inside of a bud—satin walls with side brackets softly simulating candles; a Canet bed, piled with a careful riot of sheerest and roundest of pillows; that long suit of the interior decorator, the chaise-longue; the four French engravings in their gilt frames; the latest original Josephine's secrétaire; the shine of a white adjoining bathroom. Before a door-impaneled mirror, Mrs. Pelz, in a black-lace gown that was gracious to her rotundity.