To-day he walked home with her.
She suggested tea. He let his eyes dwell on her an instant—she on the top step, he just below—and in that instant he forgot Peter. “All right,” said he, a pleasant glow in his breast, “if you'll have dinner with me. They have a fresh lot of those deep-sea oysters at Jim's.”
Then he caught her hesitation and recalled Peter. For a moment they stood in silence, then: “Don't let's trade,” she said. “Come in for tea anyway.”
He followed her in, reflecting. Peter or no Peter, it disturbed him to sec this restraint in Sue Wilde. He felt that it disturbed her a little, too. It was possible, of course, that this was one of the evenings when Peter expected to appropriate her. The Worm was the least obtrusive of men, but he could be stubborn. Then and there he asked if this was Peter's evening.
She was stooping to unlock the apartment door. “No,” she replied rather shortly, “he's working tonight.”
They had hardly got into the apartment before the bell rang, and Sue went out to answer it. The Worm, sandy of hair, mild of feature, dropped into the willow armchair, rested elbows on knees, surveyed the half-furnished living-room and smiled.
In a mason jar on the mantel, next to a hit-or-miss row of Russian novels, Havelock Ellis's Sex in Relation to Society, Freud on Dreams and Psychanalysis, and two volumes of Schnitzler's plays, blazed a large cluster of jonquils. At the other end of the mantel, drooping over the rim of a green water pitcher, were dusty yellow roses, full blown, half their petals scattered on books, mantel and hearth, their scent heavy in his nostrils. A tin wash basin, on the mission table by the wall, was packed, smothered, with pansies—buff, yellow, orange, purple, velvet black. A bunch of violets surmounted an old sugar bowl that shared with cigarette boxes, matches and an ash receiver, the tabouret by the couch-bed. But what widened the Worm's faint smile into a forthright grin, square and huge on the table, towering over the pansies, was a newly opened five-pound box of sweets.
Sue came in, smiling herself, with a hint of the rueful, bearing before her a long parcel with square ends.
“I'll bet it's roses,” observed the Worm.
She tore off the paper, opened the box with quick fingers—it was roses—deep red ones.