"Here," he said calmly and handed the animal to Greeley. "Lucky?" Greeley yelled as the claws sank into his hands. "It's a dye-job, or I'll eat it! They had it all ready and threw it out to misdirect us. Come on! Here, take it, Simms, we've got to keep it to be on the safe side." And presumably a third man's hands got clawed as they sprinted to the car. But Phil was not with them. He hadn't the heart. As the rockets roared again, he simply stood halfway down the alley, scratched and weary. XVI As the elevator door closed behind Phil and he started the weary climb from twenty-eight to twenty-nine, he was already tormenting himself for having turned down Phoebe Filmer's invitation to have a drink in her room. When she had accosted him in the lobby, babbling about how he had rescued her at the Tan Jet, he had felt the last thing he wanted to be with was a human being. But now, with nothing separating him from the loneliness of his room but an echoing flight of stairs and an empty corridor, he suddenly realized that he needed human companionship above everything. He remembered how boldly he had set forth just yesterday afternoon from his room to look at life and plunge into any adventure that came along. And as it happened he had seen so shockingly much of life and been buffeted by such vast oceans of adventure, that his brain still buzzed from it. At times during those incredible twenty-four hours, it had seemed to him that his whole character was changing, that he was becoming the daring yet sympathetic adventurer and lover he had always dreamed of being. Yet here he was, dragging himself miserably back to his room, having just pulled his usual craven trick of saying "No," when he desperately wanted, at least ten seconds later, to say "Yes." Why, from the speed with which he was falling back into his old habit patterns, he'd probably spend the evening spying on Miss Filmer from his darkened window. Oh, he could tell himself there was no reason to give a second thought to an ordinary pretty woman when he'd just met such a wickedly desirable girl as Mitzie Romadka and seen such a beauty as Dora Pannes, not to mention sharing the society of such grotesque but attractive characters as Juno Jones and Mary Akeley. But that was just rationalization and he knew it. Phoebe Filmer was more his size, and he wasn't even big enough for her.