nation turned to fire, and he took the glass from Phoebe's
hand. That was all; for at the second that his decision came, he looked
up and saw, ten yards from him, the man who had been in the cafe, and
with his jump of astonishment the glass fell from his uplifted hand.
There the man half sat, half leaned against a pile of pillows on the
corner divan. His face was cast in the same yellow wax as in the cafe,
neither the dull, pasty color of a dead man--rather a sort of virile
pallor--nor unhealthy, you'd have called it; but like a strong man who'd
worked in a mine or done night shifts in a damp climate. Amory looked
him over carefully and later he could have drawn him after a fashion,
down to the merest details. His mouth was the kind that is called frank,
and he had steady gray eyes that moved slowly from one to the other
of their group, with just the shade of a questioning expression. Amory
noticed his hands; they weren't fine at all, but they had versatility
and a tenuous strength... they were nervous hands that sat lightly
along the cushions and moved constantly with little jerky openings and
closings. Then, suddenly, Amory perceived the feet, and with a rush of
blood to the head he realized he was afraid. The feet were all wrong ...
with a sort of wrongness that he felt rather than knew.... It was like
weakness in a good woman, or blood on satin; one of those terrible
incongruities that shake little things in the back of the brain. He wore
no shoes, but, instead, a sort of half moccasin, pointed, though, like
the shoes they wore in the fourteenth century, and with the little ends
curling up. They were a darkish brown and his toes seemed to fill them
to the end.... They were unutterably terrible....

He must have said something, or looked something, for Axia's voice came
out of the void with a strange goodness.

"Well, look at Amory! Poor old Amory's sick--old head going 'round?"

"Look at that man!" cried Amory, pointing toward the corner divan.

"You mean that purple zebra!" shrieked Axia facetiously. "Ooo-ee!
Amory's got a purple zebra watching him!"

Sloane laughed vacantly.

"Ole zebra gotcha, Amory?"

There was a silence.... The man regarded Amory quizzically.... Then the
human voices fell faintly on his ear:

"Thought you weren't drinking," remarked Axia sardonically, but her
voice was good to hear; the whole divan that held the man was alive;
alive like heat waves over asphalt, like wriggling worms....