"Of course you are going to the mater's with Miss Lindsey and me for tea, per usual?" asked Mr. Farraday.
"Can't do it. Got to work on 'The Purple Slipper' while you people frolic. Good-night!" With which refusal and taunt Mr. Vandeford left Mr. Farraday at the door of his apartment-house.
Mr. Farraday looked at his watch as he started away from the curb, found the hour to be eleven o'clock, wabbled the machine first to the right and then to the left, and finally turned down-town, in which direction the Claridge reared its twelve stories of masonry at the corner of Forty-fourth and Sixth.
At about that minute these were the remarks exchanged through the open door that connected two little cell-like rooms at the Y. W. C. A.:
"Aren't you going to bed right away? I'm so sleepy that I'm brushing my face instead of my hair," Miss Adair called to Miss Lindsey. A desperate and continual desire for sleep is the pest that haunts the rural visitor to New York and Miss Adair's young health was easily its prey. She did not readily learn to run on nerves.
"You go to bed; but I've got to let the hem of my tailored linen down two inches, so it will brush against those rhododendrons as a lady's should, and sew up the opening in the neck of my chiffon blouse an inch and a half, so I won't spill any of Mrs. Farraday's tea down it. Good-night!" It goes to say that when Greek meets Vandal or the East meets the West, dents occur.
And, as Mrs. Farraday had commanded, the rhododendron party at West Marsh came to pass, to the vast enjoyment of all present, though Mr. Vandeford's absence was a deprivation to the entire company. And that night their friendly hearts would have ached if they had been able to get a vision of his strenuosity. Godfrey Vandeford, Theatrical Producer, was in full action, and chips from "The Purple Slipper" were flying in all directions.
In his bedroom in the Seventy-third Street apartment, Mr. Vandeford was stripped for the fray—to his silk pajamas—and he lay stretched upon his fumed-oak bed, with both reading-lights turned on full blaze. In his hands was the manuscript of "The Purple Slipper," which Mazie Villines had literally torn from under the hands of Grant Howard to deliver to Mr. Vandeford on Saturday afternoon, just a day later than the time set for its deliverance.
"My check and Grant's down, or no play," she had said upon entering Mr. Vandeford's apartment at about the setting of the Saturday sun. "He's off for a two week's d.t., and I gotter take care of him. Twelve-fifty is the way to write it."
"Six hundred, and not a cent more without Grant's signature," answered Mr. Vandeford. Mr. Adolph Meyers, who was listening to the conversation from the hall from which he had ushered Miss Villines into Mr. Vandeford's library, set a spring-lock on the entrance door of the apartment, and entered the library unobtrusively.