"I mean it," Max insisted seriously; "though I'll admit I'm not crazy about your accepting—yet. I've had several close calls with Sara—she's threatened to chuck the stage often before this; but every time something happened to make her change her mind. I've got a hunch maybe something will happen this time, too. If it does, I won't want any partners."
Whitaker laughed quietly and turned the conversation, accepting the manager's pseudo-confidences at their face value—that is, as pure bluff, quite consistent with the managerial pose.
They rose presently and made their way out into the crowded, blatant night of Broadway.
"We'll walk, if you don't mind," Max suggested. "It isn't far, and I'd like to get a line on the house as it goes in." He sighed affectedly. "Heaven knows when I'll see another swell audience mobbing one of my attractions!"
His companion raised no objection. This phase of the life of New York exerted an attraction for his imagination of unfailing potency. He was more willing to view it afoot than from the windows of a cab.
They pushed forward slowly through the eddying tides, elbowed by a matchless motley of humanity, deafened by its thousand tongues, dazzled to blindness by walls of living light. Whitaker experienced a sensation of participating in a royal progress: Max was plainly a man of mark; he left a wake of rippling interest. At every third step somebody hailed him, as a rule by his first name; generally he responded by a curt nod and a tightening of his teeth upon his cigar.
They turned east through Forty-sixth Street, shouldered by a denser rabble whose faces, all turned in one direction, shone livid with the glare of a gigantic electric sign, midway down the block:
Theatre Max
SARA LAW'S
FAREWELL
It was nearly half-past eight; the house had been open since seven; and still a queue ran from the gallery doors to Broadway, while still an apparently interminable string of vehicles writhed from one corner to the lobby entrance, paused to deposit its perishable freight, and streaked away to Sixth Avenue. The lobby itself was crowded to suffocation with an Occidental durbar of barbaric magnificence, the city's supreme manifestation of its religion, the ultimate rite in the worship of the pomps of the flesh.
"Look at that," Max grumbled through his cigar. "Ain't it a shame?"