The tin taxicab was rattling at the door, and Griselda came futilely to announce it.
"You'll hear from me to-morrow morning some time," I whispered to her quickly, as Pendleton, stooping under his bags, lumbered on in front of me. "Look after Alicia—and the others."
"Ay," she murmured, "have no fear."
There was a train, and in the longest half-hour of any journey we were at the Manhattan Hotel. Adjoining rooms were assigned to us with a bathroom between. There had been a sort of intoxication about the entire business that had carried me on with a blind nameless force as one is carried in a dream. Once I was alone in the four walls of the impersonal chamber, a sudden lassitude fell upon me, followed by an immense wave of dreariness. How somber and sinister was life, full of a drab and hidden tragedy. Trafficking with Pendleton—slaving at Visconti's—the dreams that had been mine! And this was the life I was living. Suppose in the morning he should refuse? On a sudden my door opened and Pendleton's hatless head appeared.
"Sure you won't back out in the morning?"
And again my nerves snapped back into their steel-like tension.
"Not even doomsday morning."
"Will you have a drink on it?"
"No," I told him, "but there is no reason why you shouldn't have one."
"I think I will," he said, and with a malign gleam of triumph he approached the telephone in my room.