“Where are you staying?”
“Up on Forty-second Street.”
“That’s a good way uptown, isn’t it?”
“Yes, pretty far up.”
“Are you boarding?”
“No; I am visiting some friends.”
“Couldn’t you get me in there as one of your school friends?”
This question indicated such an amount of assurance on the part of his old enemy that at first Hector did not know how to reply in fitting terms.
“I couldn’t take such a liberty with my friends,” he said. “Besides, it doesn’t strike me that we were on very intimate terms.”
But Jim was not sensitive to a rebuff.