What followed was due to the liftman. The impatient liftman, noticing that the pair were enjoying each other's company, made a disgraceful gesture behind their backs, slammed the gate, and ascended majestically alone in the lift towards some high altitude whence emanated an odour of boiled Spanish onions. Geraldine Foster glanced round carelessly at the rising and beautiful flunkey, and it was the sudden curve of her neck that did it. It was the sudden curve of her neck, possibly assisted by Henry's appreciation of the fact that they were now unobserved and solitary in the hall. Henry was made aware that women are the only really interesting phenomena in the world. And just as he stumbled on this profound truth, Geraldine, for her part, caught sight of the pirated editions in his hand, and murmured: 'So Mr. Snyder has told you! _What a shame_, isn't it?' The sympathy in her voice, the gaze of her eyes under the lashes, finished him. 'Do you live far from here?' he stammered, he knew not why. 'In Chenies Street,' she replied. 'I share a little flat with my friend upstairs. You must come and have tea with me some afternoon--some Saturday or Sunday. Will you? Dare I ask?' He said he should like to, awfully. 'I was dining out last night, and we were talking about you,' she began a few seconds later. Women! Wine! Wealth! Joy! Life itself! He was swept off his feet by a sudden and tremendous impulse. 'I wish,' he blurted out, interrupting her--'I wish you'd come and dine with _me_ some night, at a restaurant.' 'Oh!' she exclaimed, 'I should love it.' 'And we might go somewhere afterwards.' He was certainly capable of sublime conceptions. And she exclaimed again: 'I should love it!' The naive and innocent candour of her bliss appealed to him with extraordinary force. In a moment or so he had regained his self-control, and he managed to tell her in a fairly usual tone that he would write and suggest an evening. He parted from her in a whirl of variegated ecstasies. 'Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die,' he remarked to the street. What he meant was that, after more than a month's excogitation, he had absolutely failed to get any single shred of a theme for the successor to _Love in Babylon_--that successor out of which a mere couple of thousand pounds was to be made; and that he didn't care. CHAPTER XV HIS TERRIBLE QUANDARY