As the elevator door closed behind Phil and he started the weary climb from twenty-eight to twenty-nine, he was already tormenting himself for having turned down Phoebe Filmer's invitation to have a drink in her room. When she had accosted him in the lobby, babbling about how he had rescued her at the Tan Jet, he had felt the last thing he wanted to be with was a human being. But now, with nothing separating him from the loneliness of his room but an echoing flight of stairs and an empty corridor, he suddenly realized that he needed human companionship above everything.
He remembered how boldly he had set forth just yesterday afternoon from his room to look at life and plunge into any adventure that came along. And as it happened he had seen so shockingly much of life and been buffeted by such vast oceans of adventure, that his brain still buzzed from it. At times during those incredible twenty-four hours, it had seemed to him that his whole character was changing, that he was becoming the daring yet sympathetic adventurer and lover he had always dreamed of being.
Yet here he was, dragging himself miserably back to his room, having just pulled his usual craven trick of saying "No," when he desperately wanted, at least ten seconds later, to say "Yes." Why, from the speed with which he was falling back into his old habit patterns, he'd probably spend the evening spying on Miss Filmer from his darkened window.
Oh, he could tell himself there was no reason to give a second thought to an ordinary pretty woman when he'd just met such a wickedly desirable girl as Mitzie Romadka and seen such a beauty as Dora Pannes, not to mention sharing the society of such grotesque but attractive characters as Juno Jones and Mary Akeley. But that was just rationalization and he knew it. Phoebe Filmer was more his size, and he wasn't even big enough for her.
Or he could once more tell himself that if only Lucky were at his side, he would be brave and bold again. But even that was no longer quite true. Fact was, that everything had become much too big for him. He wanted the green cat, yes, but he wanted him as his own special pet, his mascot, his good luck cat, something to sleep at the foot of the bed—not as a mysterious mutant monster that kept getting him involved with male and female wrestlers, religious crackpots, gun-toting psychoanalysts, girls with claws, hep-thugs, world-famous scientists, espers, vice syndicates, FBL raids, national and international crimes, and a whole lot of other things that were much, much too big for Phil Gish.
He coded open his door, stepped inside, and had almost closed it behind him when he realized that he was not returning to loneliness.
On her hands and knees, apparently to look under his bed, but now with her face turned sharply towards him, was the black haired, faun-like girl whose window was opposite his. He froze in every muscle, his hand locked to the barely ajar door, ready to jerk it open and run.
She got up slowly, with a smile. "'Allo," she greeted in a warm voice with a foreign accent he couldn't place. "I have lost something and I think maybe he hide in here." She smoothed out the black pied gray suit he'd watched her take off last night. Then she leisurely ran her hand back across her head and down the pony tail in which her hair-do ended.
"Something?" Phil croaked gallantly, his hand still glued fast behind him. He couldn't help it, but every time he looked her in the eye his gaze had to travel fearfully down her figure to her 10-inch platform shoes.
"Yes," she confirmed, "a—how you call him?—pussycat." Then, after a bit, "Say, you act like you know me." Her smile widened and she shook a finger at him. "'Ave you been peek at me, you naughty boy?"