Save that these stage properties illustrated the taste of Mabel Vance, the room was of no interest. It held a rubber plant, a red velvet rocking chair, across the back of which Mrs. Vance had draped a Neapolitan scarf; an upright piano, upon which Emmanuel Day, or, as he was known to the cross-roads of Broadway and Forty-second street, “Mannie” Day, provoked the most marvelous rag-time, an enlarged photograph in crayon, of Professor Vance, in a frock coat and lawn tie, a china bull dog, coquettishly decorated with a blue bow, and, on the mantel piece, two tall beer steins and a hand telephone. From the long windows one obtained a view of the iron shutters of the new department store in Thirty-fourth Street, and of a garden, just large enough to contain a sumach tree, a refrigerator, and the packing-case in which the piano had arrived.
After leaving Winthrop, without waiting for Vance, Vera had returned directly to the house in Thirty-fifth Street, and locked herself in her room. And although “Mannie” Day had already ushered two visitors into the front room, Vera had not yet come downstairs. In consequence, Mabel Vance was in possession of the reception parlor.
Mrs. Vance was plump, pink-and-blonde, credulous and vulgar, but at all times of the utmost good humor. Her admiration for Vera was equaled only by her awe of her. On this particular afternoon, although it already was after five o’clock, Mrs. Vance still wore a short dressing sack, open at the throat, and heavy with somewhat soiled lace. But her blonde hair was freshly “marcelled,” and her nails pink and shining. In the absence of Vera, she was making a surreptitious and guilty use of the telephone. From the fact that in her left hand she held the morning telegraph open at the “previous performances” of the horses, and that the page had been cruelly lacerated by a hat pin, it was fair to suppose that whoever was at the other end of the wire, was tempting her with the closing odds at the races.
In her speculations, she was interrupted by “Mannie” Day, who entered softy through the door from the hall.
“Mannie” Day was a youth of twenty-four. It was his heart’s desire to be a “Broadwayard.” He wanted to know all of those, and to be known only by those, who moved between the giant pillars that New York threw into the sky to mark her progress North.
He knew the soiled White Way as the oldest inhabitant knows the single street of the village. He knew it from the Rathskellers underground, to the roof gardens in the sky; in his firmament the stars were the electric advertisements over Long Acre Square, his mother earth was asphalt, the breath of his nostrils gasolene, the telegraph was his Bible. His grief was that no one in the Tenderloin would take him seriously; would believe him wicked, wise, predatory. They might love him, they might laugh with him, they might clamor for his company, in no flat that could boast a piano, was he not, on his entrance, greeted with a shout; but the real Knights of the Highway treated him always as the questioning, wide-eyed child. In spite of his after-midnight pallor, in spite of his honorable scars of dissipation, it was his misfortune to be cursed with a smile that was a perpetual plea of “not guilty.”
“What can you expect?” an outspoken friend, who made a living as a wireless wire tapper, had once pointed out to him. “That smile of yours could open a safe. It could make a show girl give up money! It’s an alibi for everything from overspeeding to murder.”
Mannie, as he listened, flushed with mortification. From that moment he determined that his life should be devoted to giving the lie to that smile, to that outward and visible sign of kindness, good will, and innate innocence. As yet, he had not succeeded.
He interrupted Mabel at the telephone to inquire the whereabouts of Vera. “There’s two girls in there, now,” he said, “waiting to have their fortunes doped.”
“Let’em wait!” exclaimed Mabel. “Vera’s upstairs dressing.” In her eyes was the baleful glare of the plunger. “What was that you give me in the third race?”