He was proceeding up Broadway after leaving the store when he encountered Reggie van Tuyl, who was drifting along in somnambulistic fashion near Thirty-Ninth Street.
“Hullo, Reggie old thing!” said Archie.
“Hullo!” said Reggie, a man of few words.
“I’ve just been buying a book for Bill Brewster,” went on Archie. “It appears that old Bill—What’s the matter?”
He broke off his recital abruptly. A sort of spasm had passed across his companion’s features. The hand holding Archie’s arm had tightened convulsively. One would have said that Reginald had received a shock.
“It’s nothing,” said Reggie. “I’m all right now. I caught sight of that fellow’s clothes rather suddenly. They shook me a bit. I’m all right now,” he said, bravely.
Archie, following his friend’s gaze, understood. Reggie van Tuyl was never at his strongest in the morning, and he had a sensitive eye for clothes. He had been known to resign from clubs because members exceeded the bounds in the matter of soft shirts with dinner-jackets. And the short, thick-set man who was standing just in front of them in attitude of restful immobility was certainly no dandy. His best friend could not have called him dapper. Take him for all in all and on the hoof, he might have been posing as a model for a sketch of What the Well-Dressed Man Should Not Wear.
In costume, as in most other things, it is best to take a definite line and stick to it. This man had obviously vacillated. His neck was swathed in a green scarf; he wore an evening-dress coat; and his lower limbs were draped in a pair of tweed trousers built for a larger man. To the north he was bounded by a straw hat, to the south by brown shoes.
Archie surveyed the man’s back carefully.
“Bit thick!” he said, sympathetically. “But of course Broadway isn’t Fifth Avenue. What I mean to say is, Bohemian licence and what not. Broadway’s crammed with deuced brainy devils who don’t care how they look. Probably this bird is a master-mind of some species.”