“The scoundrels to attack women,” he was shouting, red in the face, waving his headdress in one hand. “Fortunately I was able to control myself or I might have committed an act that I should have regretted to my dying day.... It was only with the greatest selfcontrol...”
Ellen managed to slip out, ran down the stairs and out into drizzly streets. She hailed a taxi and went home. When she had got her things off she called up George Baldwin at his house. “Hello George, I’m terribly sorry I had to trouble you and Mr. Winthrop. Well if you hadnt happened to say at lunch you’d be there all the evening they probably would be just piling us out of the black maria at the Jefferson Market Court.... Of course it was funny. I’ll tell you about it sometime, but I’m so sick of all that stuff.... Oh just everything like that æsthetic dancing and literature and radicalism and psychoanalysis.... Just an overdose I guess.... Yes I guess that’s it George.... I guess I’m growing up.”
The night was one great chunk of black grinding cold. The smell of the presses still in his nose, the chirrup of
typewriters still in his ears, Jimmy Herf stood in City Hall Square with his hands in his pockets watching ragged men with caps and earsflaps pulled down over faces and necks the color of raw steak shovel snow. Old and young their faces were the same color, their clothes were the same color. A razor wind cut his ears and made his forehead ache between the eyes.
“Hello Herf, think you’ll take the job?” said a milkfaced young man who came up to him breezily and pointed to the pile of snow. “Why not, Dan. I dont know why it wouldnt be better than spending all your life rooting into other people’s affairs until you’re nothing but a goddam traveling dictograph.”
“It’d be a fine job in summer all right.... Taking the West Side?”
“I’m going to walk up.... I’ve got the heebyjeebies tonight.”
“Jez man you’ll freeze to death.”
“I dont care if I do.... You get so you dont have any private life, you’re just an automatic writing machine.”