She looked very pathetic as she said that, and Judy, remembering Irene’s misfortunes, slid into the seat beside her and put a loving arm about her shoulder.
“I care for your type,” she said. “So why worry about what a stranger thinks?”
“I’m not,” Irene said, belying her answer with a wistful look in the stranger’s direction. He was still absorbed in the mountain of typewritten pages that he held on his knee. It seemed that his work, whatever it was, engrossed him completely. He was again making corrections and additions with his pen. Judy noticed a yellow slip of paper on the seat beside him and called the other girls’ attention to it.
“It looks like a telegram,” she whispered, “and he keeps referring to it.”
“Telegrams are usually bad news,” Irene replied.
The young man sat a little distance away from them and, to all appearances, had forgotten their existence. Girl-like, they discussed him, imagining him as everything from a politician to a cub reporter, finally deciding that, since he lived in Greenwich Village, he must be an artist. Irene said she liked to think of him as talented. A dreamer, she would have called him, if it had not been for his practical interest in the business at hand—those papers and that telegram.
It was dark by the time they reached New York. The passengers were restless and eager to be out of the bus. The young man hastily crammed his typewritten work into his portfolio and Judy noticed, just as the bus stopped, that he had forgotten the telegram. She and Irene both made a dive for it with the unfortunate result that when they stood up again each of them held a torn half of the yellow slip.
“Just our luck!” exclaimed Irene. “Now we can’t return it to him. Anyway, he’s gone.”
“We could piece it together,” Pauline suggested, promptly suiting her actions to her words. When the two jagged edges were fitted against each other, this is what the astonished girls read:
DALE MEREDITH