ONE day just as Pidge was finishing luncheon with John Higgins, she was startled to hear Melton’s voice. He moved around their table with a fling of his coat tails and held out both his hands. It actually sounded, though she never was sure, as if he said something like, “I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”
Pidge fancied a sort of rueful wonder on the old editor’s face, as he announced his haste to get back to the office, and bolted out.... She was recalling the baby carriage in Santa Monica. Melton’s face was slightly broader, she thought, and the poise of young success was upon it. One thing she had never known before was how remarkably well his curly head was placed upon its shoulders. The neck was not merely a nexus, but a thing of worth in itself, with arch and movement which made him look taller and intimated something light and fleet, touching memories which Pidge could not quite grip.
They were together in the street. Melton had asked her to walk with him to his bank. He seemed on both sides of her at once, his hand drawing her deftly this way and that through the crowd, his chat and laughter in her ears, and an old indescribable weariness and helplessness in herself.
“... Sure, I could have hunted you up. In fact, I would have done it eventually, but I haven’t been in New York all the time; running back west to get my stuff up, now and then.”
“I thought you lived in New York,” Pidge said.
“I keep an apartment in East Twenty-fourth Street,” he granted.
A lull for just an instant before he went on:
“You see, it’s handy to my publishers, and my bank is only a square or two away.”
Pidge wished she could accept him for just what he seemed—the upstart American in literature. She wished to forget everything else, save the youth who said, in effect, “This is my bank, this is my solicitor, this is my publisher.” But she could not smile her scorn and pass on. She felt like the parent of a child showing off. Back of the tinkle and flush of these big days of his, which he seemed to be drinking in so breathlessly, she felt more than ever that thing about him which was imprisoned. A thing it was that called to her, kept calling beseechingly.
“I’ll never forget,” he said, speaking of the fifty dollars—“I’ll never forget that night, when I left you—and the fog in the Square. Everything was different, after that.”