In 1913 Anthony Patch’s adjustment of himself
to the universe was in process of consummation.
Physically, he had improved since his undergraduate
days—he was still too thin but his shoulders
had widened and his brunette face had lost the frightened
look of his freshman year. He was secretly orderly
and in person spick and span—his friends
declared that they had never seen his hair rumpled.
His nose was too sharp; his mouth was one of those
unfortunate mirrors of mood inclined to droop perceptibly
in moments of unhappiness, but his blue eyes were
charming, whether alert with intelligence or half closed
in an expression of melancholy humor.
One of those men devoid of the symmetry of feature
essential to the Aryan ideal, he was yet, here and
there, considered handsome—moreover, he
was very clean, in appearance and in reality, with
that especial cleanness borrowed from beauty.
Fifth and Sixth Avenues, it seemed to Anthony, were
the uprights of a gigantic ladder stretching from
Washington Square to Central Park. Coming up-town
on top of a bus toward Fifty-second Street invariably
gave him the sensation of hoisting himself hand by
hand on a series of treacherous rungs, and when the
bus jolted to a stop at his own rung he found something
akin to relief as he descended the reckless metal steps
to the sidewalk.
After that, he had but to walk down Fifty-second Street
half a block, pass a stodgy family of brownstone houses—and
then in a jiffy he was under the high ceilings of
his great front room. This was entirely satisfactory.
Here, after all, life began. Here he slept, breakfasted,
read, and entertained.
The house itself was of murky material, built in the
late nineties; in response to the steadily growing
need of small apartments each floor had been thoroughly
remodelled and rented individually. Of the four
apartments Anthony’s, on the second floor, was
the most desirable.
The front room had fine high ceilings and three large
windows that loomed down pleasantly upon Fifty-second
Street. In its appointments it escaped by a safe
margin being of any particular period; it escaped
stiffness, stuffiness, bareness, and decadence.
It smelt neither of smoke nor of incense—it
was tall and faintly blue. There was a deep lounge
of the softest brown leather with somnolence drifting
about it like a haze. There was a high screen
of Chinese lacquer chiefly concerned with geometrical
fishermen and huntsmen in black and gold; this made
a corner alcove for a voluminous chair guarded by an
orange-colored standing lamp. Deep in the fireplace
a quartered shield was burned to a murky black.
Passing through the dining-room, which, as Anthony
took only breakfast at home, was merely a magnificent
potentiality, and down a comparatively long hall,
one came to the heart and core of the apartment—Anthony’s
bedroom and bath.
