hem clicking as though they had been momentarily pulled aside.
Turning, just as he opened the door to leave, he noticed the bamboo
curtain swaying.

"Well, good-night," he said, and stepped out onto the street.

As he walked down Wordsworth Avenue, under the thunder of the L, past
lighted lunchrooms, oyster saloons, and pawnshops, Miss Chapman resumed
her sway. With the delightful velocity of thought his mind whirled in
a narrowing spiral round the experience of the evening. The small
book-crammed sitting room of the Mifflins, the sparkling fire, the
lively chirrup of the bookseller reading aloud--and there, in the old
easy chair whose horsehair stuffing was bulging out, that blue-eyed
vision of careless girlhood! Happily he had been so seated that he
could study her without seeming to do so. The line of her ankle where
the firelight danced upon it put Coles Phillips to shame, he averred.
Extraordinary, how these creatures are made to torment us with their
intolerable comeliness! Against the background of dusky bindings her
head shone with a soft haze of gold. Her face, that had an air of
naive and provoking independence, made him angry with its unnecessary
surplus of enchantment. An unaccountable gust of rage drove him
rapidly along the frozen street. "Damn it," he cried, "what right has
any girl to be as pretty as that? Why--why, I'd like to beat her!" he
muttered, amazed at himself. "What the devil right has a girl got to
look so innocently adorable?"

It would be unseemly to follow poor Aubrey in his vacillations of rage
and worship as he thrashed along Wordsworth Avenue, hearing and seeing
no more than was necessary for the preservation of his life at street
crossings. Half-smoked cigarette stubs glowed in his wake;[2] his
burly bosom echoed with incoherent oratory. In the darker stretches of
Fulton Street that lead up to the Brooklyn Bridge he fiercely
exclaimed: "By God, it's not such a bad world." As he ascended the
slope of that vast airy span, a black midget against a froth of stars,
he was gravely planning such vehemence of exploit in the advertising
profession as would make it seem less absurd to approach the President
of the Daintybits Corporation with a question for which no progenitor
of loveliness is ever quite prepared.

[2] NOTE WHILE PROOFREADING: Surely this phrase was unconsciously
lifted from R. L. S. But where does the original occur? C. D. M.

In the exact centre of the brid