The policeman, passing, paused to take him in, then satisfied as to his harmlessness, moved on.
“Busy day, to-morrow,” the Worm told himself irrelevantly. “Better turn in.”
He saw another moon-touched couple approaching. He kept out of their sight. The man was Hy Lowe, dapper but earnest, clutching the arm of his very new Miss Hansen, bending close over her.
The Worm watched until he lost them in the shadows of Waverley Place. Next, as if there were some connection, he stared down again at his own smart costume.
“Love,” he informed himself, “is an inflammation of the ego.”
Then he went home and to bed.
CHAPTER XIX—BUSINESS INTERVENES
THE Worm met Sue Wilde one afternoon as she stepped down from a Seventh Avenue car—carried it off with a quite successful air of easy surprise. He couldn't see that it harmed Peter or anybody, for him to meet her now and then. If it gave him pleasure just to see her walk—even in a middy blouse, old skirt and sneakers, she was graceful as a Grecian youth!—to speak and then listen to her voice as she answered, to glimpse her profile and sense the tint of health on her olive skin, whose business was it! So long as he was asking nothing! Besides, Sue didn't dream. He didn't intend that she should dream. He had lied to her with shy delight regarding his set habit of walking every afternoon. He hated walks—hated all forms of exercise. He knew pretty accurately when she would be through her day's work at the plant of the Interstellar Film Company, over in Jersey, because they were doing outside locations now, and outdoor work, even in April, needs light. He knew precisely what trains she could catch; had, right now, a local time table in a convenient pocket. Sue was an outdoor girl and would prefer ferry to tube. From the ferry it was car or sidewalk; either way she couldn't escape him unless she headed elsewhere than toward her dingy little apartment.