“Well, the smoke annoys her.” Aunt Matilda did not add the word “naturally,” but the tone and look conveyed it. “And she can hear your voices.” Henry Bates had to struggle with a rising anger. There were implications in that queerly hostile look that reflected on Sue as on himself. But they were and remained unspoken. They could not be met. The only possible course was to go; and to go with the miserable feeling that he was surrendering Sue to the enemy. He turned to her now, speaking with quiet dignity; little realizing that even this dignity aroused resentment and suspicion in the unreceptive mind behind those eyes on the stairs--that it looked brazen coming from a young man whose sandy hair straggled down over his ears and close to his suspiciously soft collar, whose clothes were old and wrinkled, whose mild studious countenance exhibited nothing of the vigor and the respect for conformity that are expected of young men in suburbs who must go in every morning on the seven-thirty-six and come out every evening on the five-fifty-two, and who, therefore, would naturally be classed with such queer folk as gipsies and actors. “If you like, Sue,” he said, “I'll get Betty to hurry so I can bring a suit-case out to-night.” She waited a brief moment before answering; and in that moment was swept finally within Aunt Matilda's lines. “Oh, no,” she said, speaking with sudden rapidity, “don't do that. To-morrow will do--just send them.” Then aware that she was dismissing him indefinitely, her eyes brimming again (for he had been a good friend), she extended her hand. The Worm gripped it, bowed to the forbidding figure on the stairs and left. CHAPTER XXXI--A PAIR OF RED BOOTS |THE pleasant days of quiet reading and whimsical reflection were over for the Worm, poor devil! Life caught him up without warning--that complex fascinating life of which he had long been a spectator--and swept him into swift deep currents. He was to be a mere spectator no longer. Washington Square glowed with June. The trees had not yet assumed the faded, dispirited gray-green of midsummer. The bus tops were crowded with pleasure riders, and a crowd of them pressed about the open-air terminal station held in check by uniformed guards. On the wide curves of asphalt hundreds of small Italians danced to the hurdy-gurdy or played hopscotch or roller-skated. Perambulators lined the shady walks; nurses, slim and uniformed, fat and unformed, lined the benches. Students hurried west, south and north (for it was afternoon--Saturday afternoon, as it happened). Beggars, pedlers, lovers in pairs, unkempt tenement dwellers, a policeman or two, moved slowly about, but not so slowly as they would move a few weeks later when the heat of July would have sapped the vitality of every living thing in town.