He'd overslept again, which was unusual for him. He was at his best right after breakfast, when the typewriter keys seemed to come to life under his fingers and the beautiful words rushed pell-mell across a virgin sheet of white bond stationery--so fast that the keys sometimes interlocked, and caused an infuriating delay which he could do nothing about. Orange juice, scrambled eggs and buttered toast, followed by three cups of strong black coffee, could work wonders right after breakfast. By noon he often found himself slowing down just a little. But he increased his writing tempo again right after lunch and continued on briskly, as a rule, until he called it a day at four in the afternoon. He had never been a burner of the midnight oil--the phrase had an old-fashioned but Parisian ring which he somehow liked--not even in college when he'd had to cram a hell of a lot to bluff his way through sessions of trig and calculus which he violently disliked. A writer could be independent, at least, completely himself, choose his own hours of work-- The knocking came again, louder this time, putting an abrupt end to his thoughts. "Wait a minute!" he called out. "I just got up. For Pete's sake, you little dope, give me a chance to put something on." "How did you know it was me, Ralph?" "No one else would make such a racket!" he called back. "I'm sorry, lover boy. I just thought--" "Stop it, will you? What kind of a reputation are you trying to pin on me? Please, Nora, show some sense. I've got a busy day ahead of me." He crossed the room, whipped a pair of gray doeskin slacks from the back of a chair, gathered up his socks from under the bed, kicked off his slippers and sat down on the edge of the bed, pulling on socks and trousers with awkward twistings-about. When he went to the open door he was also wearing a shirt. It never ceased to amaze him how closely life paralleled fiction--even the most realistic, hard-boiled kind of fiction, the Hemingway sort of thing. A struggling young writer and the landlady's daughter--brother, it sure could be made to fit. Anywhere, any place, any time, which meant, of course, that the hard-boiled writers were basically incurable romantics who took their cue from the way life always has of duplicating romantic patterns all over the place--every hour of every day and night. Especially every night. Not that he'd slept with her or wanted to particularly. She was a forlorn, pathetic, over-effusive, well-meaning girl of nineteen, who could not speak grammatically for more than three sentences at a stretch, but whose syntax was colorful enough at times to arouse the interest of most protective males. A man with a Pygmalian complex would have been instantly drawn to her, would have seen tremendous possibilities in her. "_Darling, I'll make you over completely. You don't realize what tenderness, affection, understanding can do. You're a rare and unusual woman, but you've never had a chance to develop._"