“Nope; Nelly’s an elegant name—an elegant name.”
He walked with Nelly behind the others, along Forty-second Street. To the outsider’s eye he was a small respectable clerk, slightly stooped, with a polite mustache and the dignity that comes from knowing well a narrow world; wearing an overcoat too light for winter; too busily edging out of the way of people and guiding the nice girl beside him into clear spaces by diffidently touching her elbow, too pettily busy to cast a glance out of the crowd and spy the passing poet or king, or the iron night sky. He was as undistinguishable a bit of the evening street life as any of the file of street-cars slashing through the wet snow. Yet, he was the chivalrous squire to the greatest lady of all his realm; he was a society author, and a man of great prospective wealth and power over mankind!
“Say, we’ll have the grandest dinner you ever saw if I get away with the play,” he was saying. “Will you come, Miss Nelly?”
“Indeed I will! Oh, you sha’n’t leave me out! Wasn’t I there when—”
“Indeed you were! Oh, we’ll have a reg’lar feast at the Astor—artichokes and truffles and all sorts of stuff…. Would—would you like it if I sold the play?”
“Course I would, silly!”
“I’d buy the business and make Rabin manager—the Souvenir Company.
So he came to relate all those intimacies of The Job; and he was overwhelmed at the ease with which she “got onto old Goglefogle.”
His preparations for writing the play were elaborate.
He paced Tom’s room till twelve-thirty, consulting as to whether he had to plan the stage-setting; smoking cigarettes in attitudes on chair arms. Next morning in the office he made numerous plans of the setting on waste half-sheets of paper. At noon he was telephoning at Tom regarding the question of whether there ought to be one desk or two on the stage.