He was looking into her eyes with an odd sort of questioning directness. She started to refuse, remembering her resolve to see him less often. But then the thought of Joe Hooper presented itself. She owed Joe a kindness or two. Perhaps if she delayed, Claybrook would change his mind. She hesitated a moment.
"All right," she assented.
Claybrook laughed shortly. "You don't sound so keen, somehow. Don't know if I can afford a Marlowe or not. You've a pretty extravagant taste in automobiles. Only one of 'em higher priced than the Marlowe."
"Oh, is it? I didn't know." And then, "But I don't see what my taste has got to do with it. It's your affair, you know. I knew Joe Hooper, that's all."
He was silent, but as he took leave of her at the doorway of her apartment, he again brought up the subject in a quiet tone. "Meet me at live to-morrow?"
"Surely," she agreed, and then went thoughtfully upstairs to bed.
As she slowly undressed she thought of Joe Hooper in his new "shepherd plaid" suit and wondered if he were getting along. And she thought of the Thompsons living in their bleak finery on the top floor of the Ardmore, just sixty feet removed from the hideous clatter of the traffic. And she speculated on the appearance of Mrs. Thompson with all the hairs in her eyebrows that nature meant them to have. And then she thought upon Claybrook's boyishness in wanting her to help him go pick out a new toy. He was without guile, entirely without guile. Suddenly she laughed aloud and then she switched off the light and went smiling to bed.
CHAPTER XVI
They met at the Marlowe garage. When Mary Louise saw Claybrook and Joe Hooper standing together in absorbed conversation, leaning each with one foot propped on the running board of a big shiny new car in the display room, she suddenly knew she had no business there. She saw them through the big plate-glass window as she came along. It would be hard to make her arrival seem casual. And when Joe Hooper raised his head as she entered the doorway—he was wearing that gaudy suit—she was confused.