He walked with Nelly behind the others, along Forty-second Street. To the outsider’s eye he was a small respectable clerk, slightly stooped, with a polite mustache and the dignity that comes from knowing well a narrow world; wearing an overcoat too light for winter; too busily edging out of the way of people and guiding the nice girl beside him into clear spaces by diffidently touching her elbow, too pettily busy to cast a glance out of the crowd and spy the passing poet or king, or the iron night sky. He was as undistinguishable a bit of the evening street life as any of the file of street-cars slashing through the wet snow. Yet, he was the chivalrous squire to the greatest lady of all his realm; he was a society author, and a man of great prospective wealth and power over mankind! “Say, we’ll have the grandest dinner you ever saw if I get away with the play,” he was saying. “Will you come, Miss Nelly?” “Indeed I will! Oh, you sha’n’t leave me out! Wasn’t I there when—” “Indeed you were! Oh, we’ll have a reg’lar feast at the Astor—artichokes and truffles and all sorts of stuff…. Would—would you like it if I sold the play?” “_Course_ I would, silly!” “I’d buy the business and make Rabin manager—the Souvenir Company. So he came to relate all those intimacies of The Job; and he was overwhelmed at the ease with which she “got onto old Goglefogle.” His preparations for writing the play were elaborate. He paced Tom’s room till twelve-thirty, consulting as to whether he had to plan the stage-setting; smoking cigarettes in attitudes on chair arms. Next morning in the office he made numerous plans of the setting on waste half-sheets of paper. At noon he was telephoning at Tom regarding the question of whether there ought to be one desk or two on the stage. He skipped the evening meal at Mrs. Arty’s, dining with literary pensiveness at the Armenian, for he had subtle problems to meditate. He bought a dollar fountain-pen, which had large gold-like bands and a rather scratchy pen-point, and a box of fairly large sheets of paper. Pressing his literary impedimenta tenderly under his arm, he attended four moving-picture and vaudeville theaters. By eleven he had seen three more one-act plays and a dramatic playlet. He slipped by the parlor door at Mrs. Arty’s.