There was no Ferry car in sight.
“Would-nibby fun,” remarked Edward, “if we had supper at Jove Pinelli’s. Night yet young....”
Emily paused a minute. “Yes, would-nib,” she agreed.
Emily, though born in Kensington, had no ladylike instincts. And of course her mother had never actually warned her not to go to unrefined Italian dives late at night with young men fortified by cocktails to the seventh degree.
When Edward, carefully following Emily, reached a table in Jove Pinelli’s sanded room he sat down, put his elbows on the table and buried his face in his hands.
“I’m too tired,” he said, concentrating no longer. “You order supper.” He was so tired that every channel in his brain felt sore. He thought, “I am going to die soon. If I were in a book and my present feelings were described, readers would say, Our Hero is going to die quite soon.... It would be luck to die in love.” He suffocated with some regret his intense sympathy for himself. He looked slackly about the room and thought, “At least it is fun being so wicked. Our Hero drunk and in love on the Barbary Coast.”
The room was meant for people who felt like this. Most of its occupants were simple excellent “steady beaux” from respectable homes showing their girls “Life.” One young man, who no doubt had a good mother in Oakland and hid no thought from her, was singing to some friends a song which he and they believed to be very daring. “Picked it up in Paris,” he said, and so indeed he had—from the Victrola in the Y. M. C. A. there. There were a few moody artists giving supper to ladies, who, though painted, looked disappointingly safe. The walls of the room, however, were decorated with scarlet devils and there were several screened grottos representing, apparently, private cubicles in Hell.
Presently Edward found that he had roused himself to say, “You know, Emily, I love you....”
“I know it,” said Emily sadly. “I know it.”