Dickie meditated. "There ain't no answer to that," he said. "I don't know why—" He added—"Why anything. It's a sort of extry word in the dictionary—don't mean much any way you look at it."
He gathered up the dishes. The man watched him, tilting back a little in his chair, his eyes twinkling under brows drawn together. A moment afterwards he left the restaurant.
It was a few nights later when Dickie saw him again—or rather when Dickie was again seen by him. This time Dickie was not in the restaurant. He was at a table in a small Free Library near Greenwich Avenue, and he was copying painstakingly with one hand from a fat volume which he held down with the other. The strong, heavily-shaded light made a circle of brilliance about him; his fair hair shone silvery bright, his face had a sort of seraphic pallor. The orderer of chicken, striding away from the desk with a hastily obtained book of reference, stopped short and stared at him; then came close and touched the thin, shiny shoulder of the blue serge coat.
"This the way you take your pleasure?" he asked abruptly.
Dickie looked up slowly, and his consciousness seemed to travel even more slowly back from the fairy doings of a midsummer night. Under the observant eyes bent upon it, his face changed extraordinarily from the face of untroubled, almost immortal childhood to the face of struggling and reserved manhood.
"Hullo," he said with a smile of recognition. "Well—yes—not always."
"What are you reading?" The man slipped into the chair beside Dickie, put on his glasses, and looked at the fat book. "Poetry? Hmp! What are you copying it for?—letter to your girl?"
Dickie had all the Westerner's prejudice against questions, but he felt drawn to this patron of the "hash-hole," so, though he drawled his answer slightly, it was an honest answer.
"It ain't my book," he said. "That's why I'm copying it."
"Why in thunder don't you take it out, you young idiot?"