... After a while a waitress spoke to him, a
fat waitress with black-rimmed eye-glasses from which
dangled a long black cord.
“Order, please!”
Her voice, he considered, was unnecessarily loud.
He looked up resentfully.
“You wanna order or doncha?”
“Of course,” he protested.
“Well, I ast you three times. This ain’t
no rest-room.”
He glanced at the big clock and discovered with a
start that it was after two. He was down around
Thirtieth Street somewhere, and after a moment he
found and translated the
[Illustration: S’DLIHC] [Transcribers
note: The illustration shows the word “CHILD’s”
in mirror image.]
in a white semicircle of letters upon the glass front.
The place was inhabited sparsely by three or four
bleak and half-frozen night-hawks.
“Give me some bacon and eggs and coffee, please.”
The waitress bent upon him a last disgusted glance
and, looking ludicrously intellectual in her corded
glasses, hurried away.
God! Gloria’s kisses had been such flowers.
He remembered as though it had been years ago the
low freshness of her voice, the beautiful lines of
her body shining through her clothes, her face lily-colored
under the lamps of the street—under the
lamps.
Misery struck at him again, piling a sort of terror
upon the ache and yearning. He had lost her.
It was true—no denying it, no softening
it. But a new idea had seared his sky—what
of Bloeckman! What would happen now? There
was a wealthy man, middle-aged enough to be tolerant
with a beautiful wife, to baby her whims and indulge
her unreason, to wear her as she perhaps wished to
be worn—a bright flower in his button-hole,
safe and secure from the things she feared. He
felt that she had been playing with the idea of marrying
Bloeckman, and it was well possible that this disappointment
in Anthony might throw her on sudden impulse into
Bloeckman’s arms.
The idea drove him childishly frantic. He wanted
to kill Bloeckman and make him suffer for his hideous
presumption. He was saying this over and over
to himself with his teeth tight shut, and a perfect
orgy of hate and fright in his eyes.
But, behind this obscene jealousy, Anthony was in
love at last, profoundly and truly in love, as the
word goes between man and woman.
His coffee appeared at his elbow and gave off for
a certain time a gradually diminishing wisp of steam.
The night manager, seated at his desk, glanced at
the motionless figure alone at the last table, and
then with a sigh moved down upon him just as the hour
hand crossed the figure three on the big clock.
