NOT until he was crossing Sixth Avenue, under the elevated road, did it occur to him that she had deliberately broken her rehearsal appointment to have tea with him and then as deliberately, had left him for the rehearsal. He had interested her; then, all at once, he had ceased to interest her. It was not the first time Peter had had this experience with women, though none of the others had been so frank about it.
Frank, she certainly was!
Resentments rose. Why on earth had he sat there so meekly and let her go on like that—he, the more or less well-known Eric Mann! Had he no force of character at all? No dignity?
Suppose she had to write plays to suit the whims of penny-splitting Broadway managers who had never heard of Andreyev and Tchekov, were bored by Shaw and Shakespeare and thought an optimist was an eye doctor—where would she get off!
During the short block between Sixth Avenue and the Square, anger conquered depression. When he entered the old brick apartment building he was muttering. When he left the elevator and walked along the dark corridor to the rooms he was considering reprisals.
Peter shared the dim old seventh-floor apartment with two fellow bachelors, Henry Sidenham Lowe and the Worm. The three were sometimes known as the Seventh-Story Men. The phrase was Hy Lowe's and referred to the newspaper stories of that absurd kidnaping escapade—the Esther MacLeod case, it was—back in 1913. The three were a bit younger then.
Hy Lowe was a slim young man with small features that appeared to be gathered in the middle of his face. His job might have been thought odd anywhere save in the Greenwich Village region. After some years of newspaper work he had settled down to the managing editorship of a missionary weekly known as My Brother's Keeper. Hy was uncommunicative, even irreverent regarding his means of livelihood, usually referring to the paper as his meal ticket, and to his employer, the Reverend Doctor Hubbell Harkness Wilde (if at all) as the Walrus. In leisure moments, perhaps as a chronic reaction from the moral strain of his job, Hy affected slang, musical comedy and girls. The partly skinned old upright piano in the studio was his. And he had a small gift at juggling plates.
The Worm was a philosopher; about Peter's age, sandy in coloring but mild in nature, reflective to the point of self-effacement. He read interminably, in more than one foreign language and was supposed to write book reviews. He had lived in odd corners of the earth and knew Gorki personally. His name was Henry Bates.
Peter came slowly into the studio, threw off coat and hat and stood, the beginnings of a complacent smile on his face.
“I've got my girl,” he announced.