“Feel better Ellie?”
“Lots.”
“I’m awfully glad.”
“Do you know you’re the only person around here who calls me Ellie. I like it.... Everybody tries to make me seem so grown up since I’ve been on the stage.”
“Stan used to.”
“Maybe that’s why I like it,” she said in a little trailing voice like a cry heard at night from far away along a beach.
Jimmy felt something clamping his throat. “Oh gosh things are rotten,” he said. “God I wish I could blame it all on capitalism the way Martin does.”
“It’s pleasant walking like this ... I love a fog.”
They walked on without speaking. Wheels rumbled through the muffling fog underlaid with the groping distant lowing of sirens and steamboat whistles on the river.
“But at least you have a career.... You like your work, you’re enormously successful,” said Herf at the corner of Fourteenth Street, and caught her arm as they crossed.