II
He pulled on his overcoat, which was built out at the shoulders until it gave Paul still another of Jack Dempsey's dimensions. He adjusted it until he was as wide on one side as on the other, pulled out his cravat until it bowed, slanted his velour hat over one eye, and strode from the store. He strode; Paul's self-respect depended on his clothes. He never strode in a bathing-suit. When he was in a bathing-suit he sidled, and walked modestly, and even somewhat slinkingly, feeling distressingly naked. But now he strode, swinging his wide shoulders, and looking the world in the eye to stare it down.
He went over to the Belvedere—continuous, eleven to eleven, fifteen cents for the best seat in the house.
He had a crush on the young lady cashier of the Belvedere, who sat in a box in the middle of the foyer from eleven to eleven with intervals out, and worked an apparatus which caused tickets to sprout in the slab before her as often as she was paid fifteen cents. Her single eye to his fifteen cents had titivated Paul's interest; as she could gaze upon him without excitement he thought she must be a very superior person. She had a share in securing his steady custom for the Belvedere.
"It'll be a nice day, if it don't rain," he said to her, and smiled fascinatingly.
She made an assenting noise through her broad, common sense nose, and did her trick with the apparatus.
"It'll be a long day, if it don't shrink!" he tried again, with a fixed grin. Paul could not afford a vaudeville show more than twice per week, and he tried to remember the jokes.
She looked up at him with a slight contraction of her brows. "I beg your pardon?" she said.
Paul leaned on the slab, and twisted his mouth sideways to spring the gag again; he felt that he had her going, at least a little.
"Shake it up!" called an impatient patron from the line.