...
Past the Rialto, the glittering front of the Astor, the jewelled
magnificence of Times Square ... a gorgeous alley of incandescence
ahead.... Then--was it years later?--he was paying the taxi-driver in
front of a white building on Fifty-seventh Street. He was in the
hall--ah, there was the negro boy from Martinique, lazy, indolent,
unchanged.
"Is Mrs. Patch in?"
"I have just came on, sah," the man announced with his incongruous
British accent.
"Take me up--"
Then the slow drone of the elevator, the three steps to the door, which
swung open at the impetus of his knock.
"Gloria!" His voice was trembling. No answer. A faint string of smoke
was rising from a cigarette-tray--a number of Vanity Fair sat astraddle
on the table.
"Gloria!"
He ran into the bedroom, the bath. She was not there. A negligee of
robin's-egg blue laid out upon the bed diffused a faint perfume,
illusive and familiar. On a chair were a pair of stockings and a street
dress; an open powder box yawned upon the bureau. She must just
have gone out.
The telephone rang abruptly and he started--answered it with all the
sensations of an impostor.
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