“Got it at last!” he laughed, as he discovered the box of matches on the window sill, and, striking one, he offered me a light. I never cared for smoking, but as I was always expected to smoke I usually accepted to save the bother of refusing and being urged.
“It’s the devil to be in such a small hole,” he said. “I seem to spend all my time looking for things. Well, now, let’s see. You’re going to pose for us, are you? Is next Sunday all right, or do you have to go to confess something?” He asked the question teasingly, as if he enjoyed poking fun at me.
“No, I never go to church,” I admitted.
A shocked look came into his face, and he opened his mouth wide.
“What? You are a heathen!”
He threw back his head and burst into the loudest and most infectious laughter I have ever heard.
“Then it’s all settled,” he said. “Now I have to go to lunch. Want to come along and have a bum lunch with me?”
I nodded, and he said: “Good!” hunted around for his hat, stuck it jauntily on his head, and, taking me by the arm, we went down the stairs.
When we were sitting in the little restaurant near Sixth Avenue, he asked me a lot of questions about myself, and before I knew it I had told him all about my father and mother and brothers and sisters and the work I had done in Montreal. Then I told him of the hard times I had in Boston. He seemed intensely interested, and when I got through he rattled off a lot of hard-luck stories about the artists, and told me something about the exigencies and makeshifts that all of them had had. He’d tell one story of hard luck after another, not as if it were something to feel badly about, but as if it were the common lot of every one. I think he did that so I wouldn’t think I myself had been especially singled out by fate.
He told me how only a few months before Fisher and he and “a couple of other guys” were all “broke,” and none of them had enough cash to buy a separate meal-ticket which entitled him to six meals for one dollar and a quarter, instead of twenty-five cents each meal. So they had all chipped in together and bought one ticket between them on the third of July. Well, when they went to dinner on the fourth of July to the Little Waldorf on Eighth Avenue, they were confronted by this sign: