The clerk disappeared again. Mary Louise was hot and embarrassed and uncomfortable. She looked up and saw Claybrook regarding her quizzically but kindly. He seemed very big and she warmed to him. He asked her no questions. She was about to speak when the clerk returned again and, calling a bell-boy, tossed out a key to him, bowed, and murmured, "Six fourteen," indicating Mary Louise.
Before following the waiting boy, she held out her hand impulsively to Claybrook and looked into his eyes.
"Thank you so much," she said. "I don't know what I would have done without you. It's all so ridiculous. Tell you all about it sometime."
She left him standing there in front of the desk, with a puzzled look upon his face, a big, reliant, kindly figure. He had not asked her a single question. He had come to her assistance when she needed it sorely. His was a friendship worth having.
She waited until the bell-boy had left her in the room and then she closed the door and locked it. Then she threw herself face down upon the bed and buried her flushed cheeks in the pillow. What a disgraceful, disreputable affair it all was. All on account of her own blindness and folly. She felt like a little child helped out of a scrape. But all the mischief was not remedied. She at least could find other lodgings to-morrow. She would not wait another day. Thanks to Claybrook she was in off the street. Suppose she had had to spend the night on a park bench? Once that had had a humorous sound to it. Claybrook was a masterful person. He had made that clerk step around. How humiliating it had all been.
She got up and switched off the lights. Then she lay down again and watched the twinkle of the lamps of an electric sign about a block away across the roofs. What was she going to do about Maida? What was she going to do about the tea room? Something would have to be done. It was impossible to go on with it any further.
She would have to buy Maida out. She could force her to sell, she supposed. But where would she get the money? She was already in debt for part of her share. Perhaps Maida would buy her out. What would she do then? Go back to Bloomfield? Just when the venture was beginning to pan out nicely? Not without a struggle, she wouldn't. Back and forth she debated the question, her mind a welter of confused decisions.
After a while she fell asleep....
Two days later she met Claybrook again. Nothing had been decided. Maida had seemed utterly indifferent. "Perfectly satisfied with things as they are," she had said; there was a diabolical stubbornness in her manner. She made capital of her own inertia. She was as cool as if dealing with an entire stranger. Finally, after two days of backing and filling, of bickering and contesting, she had named her price. "Fifteen hundred," she had said and there was nothing in the way she said it that gave the slightest hope that it would be any less. It was a hold-up.
Mary Louise met Claybrook; she was passing through the lobby of the Patterson where she still had her expensive room. He saw the trouble in her face and drew her to the lounge in the ladies' entrance.