"Quick—are you game?"
"Why, yes—Cora."
* * * * *
There is a section of New York which rays out rather crazily from old Jefferson Market and Night Court in spokes of small streets that seem to run at haphazard angles each to the other—that less sooty part of Greenwich not yet invaded by the Middle West in search of bohemia. An indescribable smack of Soho here, tired old rows of tired old houses going down year by year before the wrecker's ax, the model tenement rising insolently before the scar is cold.
It is that part of the Latin Quarter which is literally just that, lying slightly to the south and slightly to the west of that odd-fellow's land of short-haired women and long-haired men. Free love, free verse, free thought, free speech, and freed I.W.W.'s have no place here. For three blocks a little Italy runs riot in terms of pastry, spaghetti, and plaster-of-Paris shops, and quite as abruptly sobers and becomes Soho again. A Greek church squats rather broadly at the intersection of three of these streets.
There intervened between Stella Schump's and the six-story model tenement adjoining the Greek church which Miss Gertrude Cobb called home, a rhomboid of park, municipally fitted with playground apparatus, the three-block riot of little Italy, the gloomy barracks of old Jefferson Market and Night Court, and a few more blocks of still intact, tired old rows of tired old houses.
On a spring night that was as insinuatingly sweet as the crush of a rose to the cheek there walked through these lowly streets of lower Manhattan Mr. Archie Sensenbrenner, bounded on the north by a checked, deep-visored cap; on the south by a very bulldogged and very tan pair of number nines; on the east by Miss Cora Kinealy, very much of the occasion in a peaked hood faced in eider-down and a gay silk bag of slippers dangling; on the west by Miss Stella Schump, a pink scarf entwining her head like a Tanagra.
"Honest, Cora, I feel just like I'm intruding."
"'Intrudin'! Would I have invited her if we didn't want her, Arch?"
"Naw."