[ VI]
either Lethbridge nor Harrow—lately exceedingly important undergraduates at Harvard and now twin nobodies in the employment of the great Occidental Fidelity and Trust Company—neither of these young men, I say, had any particular business at the New Arts Theater that afternoon.
For the play was Barnard Haw’s Attitudes, the performance was private and intensely intellectual, the admission by invitation only, and between the acts there was supposed to be a general causerie among the gifted individuals of the audience.
Why Stanley West, president of the Occidental
Trust, should have presented to his two young kinsmen the tickets inscribed with his own name was a problem, unless everybody else, including the elevator boys, had politely declined the offer.
“That’s probably the case,” observed Lethbridge. “Do we go?”
“Art,” said Harrow, “will be on the loose among that audience. And if anybody can speak to anybody there, we’ll get spoken to just as if we were sitting for company, and first we know somebody will ask us what Art really is.”
“I’d like to see a place full of atmosphere,” suggested Lethbridge. “I’ve seen almost everything—the Café Jaune, and Chinatown, and—you remember that joint at Tangier? But I’ve never seen atmosphere. I don’t care how thin it is; I just want to say that I’ve seen it when the next girl throws it all over me.” And as Harrow remained timid, he added: “We won’t have to climb across the footlights and steal a curl from the author, because he’s already being sheared in England. There’s nothing to scare you.”