After dinner he played cowboy pool with Archie Mallison and Wilkes Bruce, winning as usual. For he did everything with the same facility that characterised his easy speech and manners—accurate without effort, naturally a technician, always graceful.
But a little of his own caste went a long way with Annan. Conversation at The Province, as well as at The Patroons, bored him very soon. So, having neatly disposed of Bruce and Mallison, he retired to the library—the only place he cared about in any club except when some old foozle went to sleep there and snored.
For an hour he dawdled among the great masters of written English, always curious, always charmed, unconsciously aware of a kinship between these immortals and himself.
For perhaps this young man was not unrelated, distantly, to that noble fellowship, though the subtle possibility had never entered his mind.
So he dallied among pages printed when writing was a fine art—and printing and binding, too; and about midnight he went below, put on his hat, and betook himself to The Looking Glass.
In the amusement district the tide of gaiety was still ebbing with the usual back-wash toward cabaret and midnight show.
The Looking Glass was dark and all doors closed, but there were many cars in waiting and a group of gossiping chauffeurs around the private entrance, where a gilded lamp burned.
Through this entrance he sauntered; a lift shot him upward; he disembarked amid a glare of light and a jolly tumult of string-music and laughter.
Somebody took his hat and stick and he walked into the directors’ suite of The Looking Glass.
There were a lot of people dancing in the handsome board-room—flowers, palms, orchestra—all the usual properties.