Then aware that she was dismissing him indefinitely, her eyes brimming again (for he had been a good friend), she extended her hand.
The Worm gripped it, bowed to the forbidding figure on the stairs and left.
CHAPTER XXXI—A PAIR OF RED BOOTS
THE pleasant days of quiet reading and whimsical reflection were over for the Worm, poor devil! Life caught him up without warning—that complex fascinating life of which he had long been a spectator—and swept him into swift deep currents. He was to be a mere spectator no longer.
Washington Square glowed with June. The trees had not yet assumed the faded, dispirited gray-green of midsummer. The bus tops were crowded with pleasure riders, and a crowd of them pressed about the open-air terminal station held in check by uniformed guards. On the wide curves of asphalt hundreds of small Italians danced to the hurdy-gurdy or played hopscotch or roller-skated. Perambulators lined the shady walks; nurses, slim and uniformed, fat and unformed, lined the benches. Students hurried west, south and north (for it was afternoon—Saturday afternoon, as it happened). Beggars, pedlers, lovers in pairs, unkempt tenement dwellers, a policeman or two, moved slowly about, but not so slowly as they would move a few weeks later when the heat of July would have sapped the vitality of every living thing in town.
But the Worm, standing near the marble arch where Fifth Avenue splendidly begins, felt not June in his heart. He walked on through the Square to the old red-brick building where for three years he and Hy Lowe and Pcter Ericson Mann had dwelt in bachelor comfort. The dingy studio apartment on the seventh floor had been his home. But it was a haunt of discord now.
He found the usually effervescent Hy pacing the lower hall like a leopard in a cage. Hy wore an immaculately pressed suit of creamy gray flannel, new red tie, red silk hosiery visible above the glistening low-cut tan shoes, a Panama hat with a fluffy striped band around it. In his hand was a thin bamboo stick which he was swinging savagely against his legs. His face worked with anger.
He pounced upon the Worm.