He swaggered beside her without an invitation. He did not give her a chance to decline his company-and soon she did not want to. He led her down to Gramercy Park, loveliest memory of village days, houses of a demure red and white ringing a fenced garden. He pointed out to her the Princeton Club, the Columbia Club, the National Arts, and the Players', and declared that two men leaving the last were John Drew and the most famous editor in America. He guided her over to Stuyvesant Park, a barren square out of old London, with a Quaker school on one side, and the voluble Ghetto on the other. He conducted her through East Side streets, where Jewish lovers parade past miles of push-carts and venerable Rabbis read the Talmud between sales of cotton socks, and showed her a little café which was a hang-out for thieves. She was excited by this contact with the underworld.
He took her to a Lithuanian restaurant, on a street which was a débâcle. One half of the restaurant was filled with shaggy Lithuanians playing cards at filthy tables; the other half was a clean haunt for tourists who came to see the slums, and here, in the heart of these "slums," saw only one another.
"Wait a while," Phil said, "and a bunch of Seeing-New-Yorkers will land here and think we're crooks."
In ten minutes a van-load of sheepish trippers from the Middle West filed into the restaurant and tried to act as though they were used to cocktails. Una was delighted when she saw them secretly peering at Phil and herself; she put one hand on her thigh and one on the table, leaned forward and tried to look tough, while Phil pretended to be quarreling with her, and the trippers' simple souls were enthralled by this glimpse of two criminals. Una really enjoyed the acting; for a moment Phil was her companion in play; and when the trippers had gone rustling out to view other haunts of vice she smiled at Phil unrestrainedly.
Instantly he took advantage of her smile, of their companionship.
He was really as simple-hearted as the trippers in his tactics.
She had been drinking ginger-ale. He urged her now to "have a real drink." He muttered confidentially: "Have a nip of sherry or a New Orleans fizz or a Bronx. That'll put heart into you. Not enough to affect you a-tall, but just enough to cheer up on. Then we'll go to a dance and really have a time. Gee! poor kid, you don't get any fun."
"No, no, I never touch it," she said, and she believed it, forgetting the claret she had drunk with Walter Babson.
She felt unsafe.
He laughed at her; assured her from his medical experience that "lots of women need a little tonic," and boisterously ordered a glass of sherry for her.
She merely sipped it. She wanted to escape. All their momentary frankness of association was gone. She feared him; she hated the complaisant waiter who brought her the drink; the fat proprietor who would take his pieces of silver, though they were the price of her soul; the policeman on the pavement, who would never think of protecting her; and the whole hideous city which benignly profited by saloons. She watched another couple down at the end of the room-an obese man and a young, pretty girl, who was hysterically drunk. Not because she had attended the Women's Christian Temperance Union at Panama and heard them condemn "the demon rum," but because the sickish smell of the alcohol was all about her now, she suddenly turned into a crusader. She sprang up, seized her gloves, snapped, "I will not touch the stuff." She marched down the room, out of the restaurant and away, not once looking back at Phil.
In about fifteen seconds she had a humorous picture of Phil trying to rush after her, but stopped by the waiter to pay his check. She began to wonder if she hadn't been slightly ridiculous in attempting to slay Demon Rum by careering down the restaurant. But "I don't care!" she said, stoutly. "I'm glad I took a stand instead of just rambling along and wondering what it was all about, the way I did with Walter."
Phil caught up to her and instantly began to complain. "Say, you certainly made a sight out of yourself-and out of me-leaving me sitting there with the waiter laughing his boob head off at me. Lord! I'll never dare go near the place again."
"Your own fault." This problem was so clear, so unconfused to her.
"It wasn't all my fault," he said. "You didn't have to take a drink." His voice fell to a pathetic whimper. "I was showing you hospitality the best way I knew how. You won't never know how you hurt my feelin's."
The problem instantly became complicated again. Perhaps she had hurt his rudimentary sense of courtesy. Perhaps Walter Babson would have sympathized with Phil, not with her. She peeped at Phil. He trailed along with a forlorn baby look which did not change.
She was very uncomfortable as she said a brief good-night at the flat. She half wished that he would give her a chance to recant. She saw him and his injured feelings as enormously important.
She undressed in a tremor of misgiving. She put her thin, pretty kimono over her nightgown, braided her hair, and curled on the bed, condemning herself for having been so supercilious to the rat who had never had a chance.
It was late-long after eleven-when there was a tapping on the door.
She started, listened rigidly.
Phil's voice whispered from the halclass="underline" "Open your door just half an inch, Miss Golden. Something I wanted to say."
Her pity for him made his pleading request like a command. She drew her kimono close and peeped out at him.
"I knew you were up," he whispered; "saw the light under your door. I been so worried. I didn't mean to shock you, or nothing, but if you feel I did mean to, I want to apologize. Gee! me, I couldn't sleep one wink if I thought you was offended."
"It's all right-" she began.
"Say, come into the dining-room. Everybody gone to bed. I want to explain-gee! you gotta give me a chance to be good. If you don't use no good influence over me, nobody never will, I guess."
His whisper was full of masculine urgency, husky, bold. She shivered. She hesitated, did not answer.
"All right," he mourned. "I don't blame you none, but it's pretty hard-"
"I'll come just for a moment," she said, and shut the door.
She was excited, flushed. She wrapped her braids around her head, gentle braids of pale gold, and her undistinguished face, thus framed, was young and sweet.
She hastened out to the dining-room.
What was the "parlor" by day the Grays used for their own bedroom, but the dining-room had a big, ugly, leather settee and two rockers, and it served as a secondary living-room.
Here Phil waited, at the end of the settee. She headed for a rocker, but he piled sofa-cushions for her at the other end of the settee, and she obediently sank down there.
"Listen," he said, in a tone of lofty lamentation, "I don't know as I can ever, ever make you understand I just wanted to give you a good time. I seen you was in mourning, and I thinks, 'Maybe you could brighten her up a little-'"
"I am sorry I didn't understand."
"Una, Una! Do you suppose you could ever stoop to helping a bad egg like me?" he demanded.
His hand fell on hers. It comforted her chilly hand. She let it lie there. Speech became difficult for her.
"Why, why yes-" she stammered.
In reaction to her scorn of him, she was all accepting faith.
"Oh, if you could-and if I could make you less lonely sometimes-"
In his voice was a perilous tenderness; for the rat, trained to beguile neurotic patients in his absurd practice, could croon like the very mother of pity.
"Yes, I am lonely sometimes," she heard herself admitting-far-off, dreaming, needing the close affection that her mother and Walter had once given her.
"Poor little girl-you're so much better raised and educated than me, but you got to have friendship jus' same."
His arm was about her shoulder. For a second she leaned against him.