She sipped warily.
“Don’t mind my question. It isn’t fair. But tell me, doesn’t it do something to you—to get even a man like me going, for instance,—to make him all different and full of pictures that haven’t anything to do with the case?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
He stared at her. “You ought to. You do it. I’m not talking of art or soul, or any of that stuff. That isn’t it. I mean just what your singing amounts to in my case. It means New York, but not the routine New York—possibly the New York that might be. It means Maying—whatever that is——”
“You must have been drinking a lot, since I left Brandt’s,” she said merrily.
He didn’t let it hurt him, and was miserable anyway. “The fact is, I didn’t take a drink since Sixth avenue, until a moment ago.”
He saw that she was debating the vital matter of the evening—whether he was a piker who must be shaken presently, or whether he would really make good on his offer to help in the essentials of career.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Bessie Brealt.”
“And where could I find you, if I wanted to write?”