As she goes through the shining soundless revolving doors, that spin before her gloved hand touches the glass, there shoots through her a sudden pang of something forgotten. Gloves, purse, vanity case, handkerchief, I have them all. Didn’t have an umbrella. What did I forget in the taxicab? But already she is advancing smiling towards two gray men in black with white shirtfronts getting to their feet, smiling, holding out their hands.
Bob Hildebrand in dressing gown and pyjamas walked up and down in front of the long windows smoking a pipe. Through the sliding doors into the front came a sound of glasses tinkling and shuffling feet and laughing and Running Wild grating hazily out of a blunt needle on the phonograph.
“Why dont you park here for the night?” Hildebrand was
saying in his deep serious voice. “Those people’ll fade out gradually.... We can put you up on the couch.”
“No thanks,” said Jimmy. “They’ll start talking psychoanalysis in a minute and they’ll be here till dawn.”
“But you’d much better take a morning train.”
“I’m not going to take any kind of a train.”
“Say Herf did you read about the man in Philadelphia who was killed because he wore his straw hat on the fourteenth of May?”
“By God if I was starting a new religion he’d be made a saint.”