He reached the main floor, but made a hasty crossing of the gaudy vestibule without stopping to speak to the hall-boy. He had left his baggage at the station, expecting to send it to his wife's apartment when he found it. He had found it, but he could imagine what would happen to the baggage if he sent it there.
“All right!” he said to himself. “If it's war she wants, cry havoc and let slip the sleuth hounds.”
He went to a drug-store and had his wounds sterilized and plastered, saying that a pet cat had scratched him.
“Just so,” said the drug clerk, with a grin. “Pet cats are very dangerous.”
Gilfoyle wanted to slug him, but he wanted his wounds dressed more. He walked and walked down the back avenues till he reached his old boarding-house district near Greenwich Village. He found a landlady who had trusted him often and been paid eventually. He gave his baggage checks to an expressman and went into retirement for meditation.
When his suit-case arrived he got out the poems he had been writing to Anita. He clenched them for destruction, but an exquisite line caught his eye. Why should his art suffer because of a woman's perfidy? He had intended to sonnetize Anita into perenniality. She had played him false. Just for that he would leave her mortal. She should perish.
The poems would keep. He might find another and a worthier client for posterity. Or he might put an imaginary name there, as other poets had done. He wanted one that would slip into the poetry easily. He could use “Pepita” without deranging the rhyme.
He glared at the picture of Dyckman. He knew the face well. He had seen it in print numberless times. He had had the man pointed out to him at races and horse-shows and polo-games and bazaars.
He struck the photograph in the face, realizing that he could not have reached the face of the big athlete. He wondered why this fellow should have been given such stature with such wealth. He was ghastly rich, the snob, the useless cumberer of the ground!
All of Gilfoyle's pseudo-socialistic hostility to wealth and the wealthy came to the aid of his jealousy. To despoil the man was a duty. He had decoyed Anita from her duty by his millions. Not that she was unwilling to be decoyed. And now she would revel in her ill-got luxury, while her legal husband could starve in a garret.