I. N.
He didn’t have Saturday afternoon off, but he said he did in his note, and at one-thirty he appeared at her door in a new spring suit (purchased on Tuesday), a new spring hat, very fuzzy and gay (purchased Saturday noon), and the walking-stick he had bought on Tottenham Court Road, but decently concealed from the boarding-house.
Istra took him to what she called a “futurist play.” She explained it all to him several times, and she stood him tea and muffins, and recalled Mrs. Cattermole’s establishment with full attention to Mrs. Cattermole’s bulbous but earnest nose. They dined at the Brevoort, and were back at nine-thirty; for, said Istra, she was “just a bit tired, Mouse.”
They stood at the door of Istra’s room. Istra said, “You may come in—just for a minute.”
It was the first time he had even peeped into her room in New York. The old shyness was on him, and he glanced back.
Nelly was just coming up-stairs, staring at him where he stood inside the door, her lips apart with amazement.
Ladies distinctly did not entertain in their rooms at Mrs. Arty’s.
He wanted to rush out, to explain, to invite her in, to—to— He stuttered in his thought, and by now Nelly had hastened past, her face turned from them.
Uneasily he tilted on the front of a cane-seated rocking-chair, glaring at a pile of books before one of Istra’s trunks. Istra sat on the bedside nursing her knee. She burst out:
“O Mouse dear, I’m so bored by everybody—every sort of everybody…. Of course I don’t mean you; you’re a good pal…. Oh—Paris is too complex—especially when you can’t quite get the nasal vowels—and New York is too youthful and earnest; and Dos Puentes, California, will be plain hell…. And all my little parties—I start out on them happily, always, as naive as a kiddy going to a birthday party, and then I get there and find I can’t even dance square dances, as the kiddy does, and go home—Oh damn it, damn it, damn it! Am I shocking you? Well, what do I care if I shock everybody!”