"Hoo, I gotta go home. My wife'll be back from the movies by eleven, and if I ain't home and in bed when she gets there, she'll skin me alive; that's what she'll do."
Mr. Braddy was struck by the application of this to his own case.
"Waddabout me, hey? Waddabout me, B'lum?" he asked plaintively. "Angelica will just about kill me."
Mr. Lum, leaning against the Automat, darkly considered this eventuality. At length he spoke.
"You go getta Turkish bath. Tell 'Gellica y' hadda stay in store all night to take inventory. Turkish bath'll make you fresh as a daisy. Fresh as a li'l' daisy—fresh as a li'l' daisy——" Saying which Mr. Lum disappeared into the eddying crowd and was gone. Mr. Braddy was alone in the great city.
But he was not dismayed. While disposing of the ancient liquor, he and Mr. Lum had discussed philosophies of life, and Mr. Braddy had decided that his was, "A man can do what he is a-mind to." And Mr. Braddy was very much a-mind to take a Turkish bath. To him it represented the last stroke that cut the shackles of timidity. "I can and I will," he said a bit thickly, in imitation of Mr. Lum's heroes.
§3
There was a line of men, mostly paunchy, waiting to be assigned dressing rooms when Mr. Braddy entered the Turkish bath, egged sternly on by his new philosophy. He did not shuffle meekly into the lowest place and wait the fulfillment of the biblical promise that some one would say, "Friend, go up higher." Not he. "I can and I will," he remarked to the man at the end of the line, and, forthwith, with a majestic, if rolling, gait, advanced to the window where a rabbit of a man, with nose glasses chained to his head, was sleepily dealing out keys and taking in valuables. The other men in line were too surprised to protest. Mr. Braddy took off his huge derby hat and rapped briskly on the counter.
"Service, here. Li'l' service!"
The Rabbit with the nose glasses blinked mildly.