Several of them he had met
in a place called "Sammy's," on Forty-third Street, where, if one
knocked on the door and were favorably passed on from behind a grating,
one could sit around a great round table drinking fairly good whiskey.
It was here that he encountered a man named Parker Allison, who had been
exactly the wrong sort of rounder at Harvard, and who was running
through a large "yeast" fortune as rapidly as possible. Parker Allison's
notion of distinction consisted in driving a noisy red-and-yellow
racing-car up Broadway with two glittering, hard-eyed girls beside him.
He was the sort who dined with two girls rather than with one--his
imagination was almost incapable of sustaining a dialogue.
Besides Allison there was Pete Lytell, who wore a gray derby on the side
of his head. He always had money and he was customarily cheerful, so
Anthony held aimless, long-winded conversation with him through many
afternoons of the summer and fall. Lytell, he found, not only talked but
reasoned in phrases. His philosophy was a series of them, assimilated
here and there through an active, thoughtless life. He had phrases about
Socialism--the immemorial ones; he had phrases pertaining to the
existence of a personal deity--something about one time when he had been
in a railroad accident; and he had phrases about the Irish problem, the
sort of woman he respected, and the futility of prohibition.
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