"Why, hello, Whittington!" said Bellamy, smiling in spite of his disgruntlement, to see that carved mask of a wise clown upturned to his. "All by yourself? What's happened to the girl crop you should be so lonesome?"
Without direct reply, Mr. Freddie Whittington linked his arm and began to walk toward Fifth avenue.
"Just the man I'm looking for," he declared without a smile. "Come along. Got a thousand women I want you to meet 'safternoon. They'll take care of your orchids."
"Well," Bellamy conceded, "that sounds reasonable. But what do you say, we drop in at the Club? Got something there won't do us any good—in my locker."
VIII
On the far West Side, well beyond the drab iron articulation of the Ninth Avenue Elevated, in a region of New York whose every aspect was foreign to Lucinda's eyes, the brougham drew to a shuddering stop, in thoroughbred aversion to such surroundings, before a row of blank-avised brick buildings whose façades of varying heights and widths showed them to have been originally designed for diverse uses. That they were today, however, united in one service was proved by the legend that linked them together, letters of black on a broad white band running from end to end of the row beneath its second-story windows:
ALMA DALEY STUDIOS—CULP CINEMAS INC.—BEN CULP, PRES'T.
Across the way unsightly tenements grinned like a company of draggletail crones who had heard a rare lot about the goings-on of picture actors and, through this happy accident of propinquity, were in a position to tell the world it didn't know the half of it. Children liberally embellished with local colour swarmed on sidewalks where ash and garbage-cans flourished in subtropical luxuriance, and disputed the roadway with the ramshackle wagons and push-carts of peddlers, horse-drawn drays, and grinding, gargantuan motor-trucks that snarled ferociously at the aliens, the frail, pretty pleasure cars from Fifth avenue. Apparently an abattoir was languishing nearby, discouraged in its yearning to lose consciousness of self in the world's oblivion. At the end of the street the Hudson ran, a glimpse of incredible blue furrowed by snowy wakes.
Such the nursery in which what Mr. Culp (or his press agent) had brilliantly imaged as the youngest, fairest sister of the plastic arts was fostering the finest flower of its expression, to wit, the artistry of Alma Daley....