The others had been regarding her as a meek and abashed apprentice in their realms, but now they began to pelt her with more respectful badinage, with the exception of Oppendorf, who watched her with a sleepy stare of approval and remained silent. This girl wasn’t half stupid at bottom, but just ignorant of many things.
The group repaired to Margaret’s nearby studio and danced to a phonograph and slipped into varying stages of tipsiness. Helgin did not dance, but sat in a corner and talked to Blanche. He became mellowly garrulous and somewhat less malicious, and he regarded Blanche as a fumbling but slightly diverting barbarian—diverting for a night or two at least. They were mildly interesting as long as they clung to their ferocious sassiness, but they always wound up by becoming girlishly wistful, and pleading, and more disrobed. He began to tell her anecdotes of his past, in which he was always laughing, penetrating, and triumphant at somebody else’s expense, and she listened eagerly. My, but this man certainly knew how to talk! He was always getting the best of people—you had to take at least forty per cent off from any fellow’s claims in that direction—but he really was a great writer, and he knew so many words and handled them so gracefully.
Urged by a perverse whim, he invited Blanche to come with him to a party which he had promised to attend on the following night. The affair was to be a gathering of literary and theatrical celebrities and near celebrities, together with their latest fads and fancies in human form, and it might be amusing to bring this blunt, would-be highbrowish, young hair-dresser and see whether the assembled pedestals would overwhelm her.
While Blanche suspected that he was playing with her and had only the impulse to grasp a flitting distraction, she felt delighted at this second opportunity to meet “famous” writers, and artists, and actors, and as she accepted the invitation she said to herself: “He thinks I’m just a snippy nobody, and he wants to show me off and then see what happens—like letting the puppy run loose in the parlor. Oh, I know. But what do I care? I might make friends at this party with two or three people just as intelligent as he is, and maybe more honest.”
While Helgin left her emotionally unaroused, she was nevertheless dazed by his vocabulary and his mental swiftness, which she frequently had to stumble after, and a little flattered by his talkative attention, in spite of herself. The genially wise-cracking, quizzically aloof, and patronizing air, which he never deserted, irritated her but did not drive away the spell of her attention. After all, he made Rosenberg, the most intelligent man in her past, sound like a stuttering, yearning baby. Funny, how you changed! She had once looked up to this same Rosenberg, as though he were a luring and puzzling god. Well, that was life—listening and clinging to people until you grew beyond them. The only man whom she could permanently love would be one always a little superior to her, and urging her to catch up with him, and kindly waiting a little now and then, so as not to get too far ahead of her.
When she reached her home she felt tired but “up in the air.” A long, hopeless stroll and a chance acquaintanceship had really led her into a new world—it was like a fairy tale, wasn’t it? Helgin had remained in the taxicab, after arranging to meet her at Margaret’s studio on the following night, and hadn’t even attempted to hold her hand ... not that that mattered, though she was a little curious to know how men of this kind “went about it.”
He had refrained from touching her because it would have disrupted his nonchalant posture—the meticulous avoidance of sexual defeat with which he kept his egotism intact. He was like a watchman, ever alert in front of a towering but shaky house of cards.
It was 2 A.M. when she entered her bedroom, but her mind was still spinning and darting about, in spite of her physical weariness, and, moved by an irresistible desire, and a sudden confidence that had been born from her surprising evening, she took a pad of paper from one of her bureau drawers and sat up in bed until 4 A.M., writing a sketch of the tearoom she had visited, and the people within it. The sketch was crude and at times ungrammatical, but it had an awkward sense of irony and humor which clung to small, insufficient words or hugged inappropriately long ones, and it was filled with clumsily good phrases such as: “They made a lot of noise and then whispered like they were ashamed of it,” or “She had small eyes and they got smaller when she talked,” “She was wearing a daisy, georgette thing and she acted like it.” Sturdily, but with little equipment, her thought bent to the novel wrestle with words on paper, and she felt an odd, half-uncertain thrill when she had finished the sketch. Did it have anything to it, or was it entirely bad? Well, she’d show it to Helgin or Oppendorf on the next night and get ready for the old cleaver. Nothing like trying, anyway, and curiously, she felt a beautiful relief now, as though she had emptied herself for the first time in a way that approached satisfaction.
On the next day she was drowsy but cheerful at the Beauty Parlor, managing somehow to stagger through the quick-fingered details of her work, but experiencing a rising strain. This would never do—she would have to be wakeful and at her best for the coming party. It wouldn’t be like going out with some silly man, feigning to listen to his “I am it” gab, and leaving him around midnight, with several yawns and the usual, semievaded kiss and hug. Through using the reliable excuse of serious illness in her family, she succeeded in leaving the shop at three in the afternoon, hastening home and sleeping there until nearly seven. When she sat at the supper-table with the rest of the family, Harry said: “Say, I’ve got some news for yuh. Ran across Joe Campbell on Broadway an’ had a long chin-fest with him. He says he begged yuh to marry him the other night and yuh turned him down flat, but he’s still leavin’ the prop’sition open. Believe me, I wouldn’t, if I was him. He asked me to tell yuh, anyway.”
“How interesting,” Blanche replied. “Suppose you tell your friend, Mister Campbell, to go to the devil.”