"I'm only thirty-one."

"More news for Sweeny. You'll never see forty again."

"That statement," said P. Sybarite with some asperity, "is an uncivil untruth dictated by a spirit of gratuitous contentiousness--"

"Good G.o.d!" cried Bross in alarm. "I'm wrong and you're right and I won't do it again--and forgive me for livin'!"

"With pleasure," agreed P. Sybarite pleasantly....

"It's a funny world," George resumed in philosophic humour, after a time. "You wouldn't think I could work in the same dump with you seven years and only be startin' to find out things about you--like to-day.

I always thought your name was Pete--honest."

"Continue to think so," P. Sybarite advised briefly.

"Your people had money, didn't they, oncet?"

"I've been told so, but if true, it only goes to prove there's nothing in the theory of heredity...."

"I gotcha," announced Bross, upon prolonged and painful a.n.a.lysis.

"How?" asked P. Sybarite, who had fallen to thinking of other matters.

"I mean, I just dropped to your high-sign to mind my own business. All right, P.S. Far be it from me to wanta pry into your Past. Besides, I 'm scared to--never can tell what I'll turn up--like, f'rinstance, Per--"

"Steady!"

"Like that they usta call you when you was innocent, I mean."

To this P. Sybarite made no response; and George subsided into morose reflections. It irked him sore to remember he had been worsted by the meek little slip of a bookkeeper trotting so quietly at his elbow.

He was a man of his word, was George Bross; not for anything would he have gone back on his promise to keep secret that afternoon's t.i.tillating discovery; likewise he was a covetous soul, loath to forfeit the promised treat; withal he was human (after his kind) and since reprisals were not barred by their understanding, he began then and there to ponder the same. One way or another, that day's humiliation must be balanced; else he might never again hold up his head in the company of gentlemen of spirit.

But how to compa.s.s this desire, frankly puzzled him. It were cowardly to contemplate knockin' the block off'n P. Sybarite; the disparity of their statures forebade; moreover, George entertained a vexatious suspicion that P. Sybarite's explanation on his recent downfall had not been altogether disingenuous; he didn't quite believe it had been due solely to his own clumsiness and an advent.i.tious foot.

"That sort of thing don't never _happen_," George a.s.sured himself privately. "I was outcla.s.sed, all right, all right. What I wanna know is: where'd he couple up with the ring-wisdom?"

Repeated if covert glances at his companion supplied no clue; P.

Sybarite's face remained as uncommunicative as well-to-do relations by marriage; his shadowy, pale and wistful smile denoted, if anything, only an almost childlike pleasure in antic.i.p.ation of the evening's promised amus.e.m.e.nt.

Suddenly it was borne in upon the shipping clerk that in the probable arrangement of the proposed party he would be expected to dance attendance upon Miss Violet Prim, leaving P. Sybarite free to devote himself to Miss Lessing. Whereupon George scowled darkly.

"P.S.'s got his nerve with him," he protested privately, "to cop out the one pippin in the house all for his lonely. It's a wonder he wouldn't slip her a chanct to enjoy herself with summon' her own age....

"Not," he admitted ruefully, "that I'd find it healthy to pull any rough stuff with Vi lookin' on. I don't even like to think of myself lampin' any other skirt while Violet's got _her_ wicks trimmed and burnin' bright."

Then he made an end to envy for the time being, and turned his attention to more pressing concerns; but though he pondered with all his might and main, it seemed impossible to excogitate any way to square his account with P. Sybarite. And when, at Thirty-eighth Street, the latter made an excuse to part with George, instead of going home in his company, the shipping clerk was too thoroughly disgusted to question the subterfuge. He was, indeed, a bit relieved; the temporary dissociation promised just so much more time for solitary conspiracy.

Turning west, he was presently prompted by that arch-comedian Destiny (disguised as Thirst) to drop into Clancey's for a sh.e.l.l of beer.

Now in Clancey's George found a crumpled copy of the _Evening Journal_ almost afloat on the high-tide of the dregs-drenched bar. Rescuing the sheet, he smoothed it out, examined (grinning) its daily meed of comics, read every word on the "Sports Page," ploughed through the weekly vaudeville charts, scanned the advertis.e.m.e.nts, and at length reviewed the news columns with a listless eye.

It may have been the stimulation of his drink, but it was probably nothing more nor less than jealousy that sparked his sluggish imagination as he contemplated a two-column reproduction in coa.r.s.e half-tone of a photograph ent.i.tled "Marian Blessington." Slowly the light dawned upon mental darkness; slowly his grin broadened and became fixed--even as his great scheme for the confusion and confounding of P. Sybarite took shape and matured.

He left Clancey's presently, stepping high, with a mind elate; foretasting victory; convinced that he harboured within him the makings of a devil of a fellow, all the essential qualifications of (not to put _too_ fine a point upon it) a regular wag....

III

THE GLOVE COUNTER

With a feeling of some guilt, becoming in one who stoops to unworthy artifice, P. Sybarite walked slowly on up Broadway a little way, then doubled on his trail, going softly until a swift and stealthy survey westward from the corner of Thirty-eighth Street a.s.sured him that George was not skulking thereabouts to spy upon him. Then mending his pace, he held briskly on toward the shopping district.

From afar the clock recently restored to its coign high above unlovely Greeley Square warned him that his hour was fleeting: in twenty minutes it would be six o'clock; at six, sharp, Blessington's would close its doors. Distressed, he scurried on, crossed Thirty-fourth Street, aimed himself courageously for the wide entrance of the department store, battled manfully through the retreating army of feminine shoppers--and gained the glove counter with a good fifteen minutes to spare.

And there he halted, confused and blushing in recognition of circ.u.mstances as unpropitious as unforeseen.

These consisted in three girls behind the counter and one customer before it; the latter commanding the attention and services of a fair young woman with a pleasant manner; while of the two disengaged saleswomen, one bold, disdainful brunette was preoccupied with her back hair and prepared mutinously to ignore anything remotely resembling a belated customer whose demands might busy her beyond the closing hour, and the other had a merry eye and a receptive smile for the hesitant little man with the funny clothes and the quaint pink face of embarra.s.sment. In most abject consternation, P. Sybarite turned and fled.

Weathering the end of the glove counter and shaping a course through the aisle that paralleled it, he found himself in a channel of horrors, threatened on one side by a display of most intimate lingerie, belaced and beribboned distractingly, on the other by a long rank of slender and gracious (if stolid) feminine limbs, one and all neatly amputated above their bended knees and bedight in silken hosiery to shame the rainbow; while to right and left, behind these impudent revelations, lurked sirens with shameless eyes and mouths of scarlet mockery.

A cold sweat damped the forehead of P. Sybarite. Inconsistently, his face flamed. He stared fixedly dead ahead and tore through that aisle like a delicate-minded jack-rabbit. He thought giggles were audible in his wake; and ere he could escape found his way barred by Authority and Dignity in one wonderfully frock-coated person.

"You were looking for something?" demanded this menace incarnate, in an awful voice accompanied by a terrible gesture.

P. Sybarite brought up standing, his nose six inches from and his eyes held in fascination to the imitation pearl scarf-pin in the beautiful cravat affected by his interlocutor.

"Gloves--!" he gasped guiltily.

"This way, if you please."

With this, Dignity and Authority clamped an inexorable hand about his upper arm, swung him round, and piloted him gently but ruthlessly back the way he had come, back to the glove counter, where he was planted directly in front of the dashing, dark saleslady with absorbing back hair and the manner of remote hauteur.

"Miss Brady, this gentleman wants to see some gloves."

The eyes of Miss Brady flashed ominously; as plain as print, they said: "Does, does he? Well, leave him to _me_!"

Aloud, she murmured from an incalculable distance: "Oh, ve-ry well!"

A moment later, looking over the customer's head, she added icily: "What kind?"

The floor-walker retired, leaving P. Sybarite a free agent but none the less haunted by a feeling that a suspicious eye was being kept on the small of his back. He stammered something quite inarticulate.

The brune G.o.ddess shaped ironic lips:

"Chauffeurs', I presoom?"