ou," he said huskily. "Now, do please
find some way to get rid of me."

Smiling quietly, the girl recovered the glove boxes.

"I'm afraid we haven't what you want in stock," she said in a voice
not loud but clear enough to carry to the ears of her inquisitive
co-labourers. "We're expecting a fresh shipment in next week--if you
could stop in then...."

"Thank you very much," said P. Sybarite with uncalled-for emotion.

He backed away awkwardly, spoiled the effect altogether by lifting his
hat, wheeled and broke for the doors....

IV

A LIKELY STORY

From the squalour, the heat, dirt and turmoil of Eighth Avenue, P.
Sybarite turned west on Thirty-eighth Street to seek his
boarding-house.

This establishment--between which and the Cave of the Smell his
existence alternated with the monotony of a pendulum--was situated
midway on the block on the north side of the street. It boasted a
front yard fenced off from the sidewalk with a rusty railing: a plot
of arid earth scantily tufted with grass, suggesting that stage of
baldness which finally precedes complete nudity. Behind this, the
moat-like area was spanned to the front door by a ragged stoop of
brownstone. The four-story facade was of brick whose pristine coat of
fair white paint had aged to a dry and flaking crust, lending the
house an appearance distinctly eczematous.

The sun of April, declining, threw down the street a slant of kindly
light to mitigate its homeliness. In this ethereal evanescence the
house Romance took the air upon the stoop.

George Bross was eighty-five per-centum of the house Romance. The
remainder was Miss Violet Prim. Mr. Bross sat a step or two below Miss
Prim, his knees adjacent to his chin, his face, upturned to his
charmer, wreathed in a fond and fatuous smile. From her higher plane,
she smiled in like wise down upon him. She seemed in the eyes of her
lover unusually fair--and was: Saturday was her day for seeming
unusually fair; by the following Thursday there would begin to be a
barely perceptible shadow round the roots of her golden hair....

She was a spirited and abundant creature, hopelessly healthy beneath
the coat of paint, powder and peroxide with which she armoured herself
against the battle of Life. Normally good-looking in ordinary
daylight, she was a radiant beauty across footlights. Her eyes were
bright even at such times as belladonna lacked in them; her nose
pretty and pert; her mouth, open for laughter