The Worm, taken aback, stared at him. Then, slowly, he smiled. He didn't care particularly about the Muscovy. It was too self-consciously “interesting”--too much like all the semi-amateur, short-lived little basement restaurants that succeed one another with some rapidity in the Greenwich Village section. The Worm was thinking again of Jim's exceedingly Anglo-Saxon chop house and of those salty deep-sea oysters, arrived this day. At the Muscovy you had Russian table-cloths and napkins. The tables were too small there, and set too close together. You couldn't talk. You couldn't think. He wondered if Peter hadn't chosen the place, thus arbitrarily, because Sue's friends would be there and would see her enacting this freedom of his. Peter was now pecking with a rather extraordinary show of energy at the typewriter. The Worm, studying him, noted that his body was rigidly erect and his forehead beaded with sweat, and began to realize that the man was in a distinct state of nerves. It was no good talking to him--not now. So, meekly but not unhumorously obeying orders, the Worm set out. Sue met him at her door with a demure smile. “Where is it?” she asked--“Jim's?” He shook his head. His face, the tone of his voice, were impenetrable. There was not so much as a glimmer of mischief in his quietly expressive eyes; though Sue, knowing Henry Bates, looked there for it. “No,” he said, “we are to go to the Muscovy.” Peter, meanwhile, continued his frenzy of work for a quarter-hour; then slackened; finally stopped, sighed, ran his long fingers through his hair, and gloomy again, turned wearily around to the desk, unlocked his own particular drawer, brought out the three bank books and resumed his figuring on the pad. If you could have looked over his shoulder you would have seen that his pencil faltered; that he added one column, slowly and laboriously, six or seven times, getting a different result each time; and that then, instead of keeping at it or even throwing the book back into the drawer, he fell to marking over the figures, shading the down strokes, elaborating the dollar signs, enclosing the whole column within a two-lined box and then placing carefully-rounded dots in rows between the double lines. This done, he lowered his head and sighted, to see if the rows were straight. They were not satisfactory. He hunted through the top drawers and then on the bookcase for an eraser.... There was a loud knock at the door. He started, caught his breath, then sank back, limp and white, in his chair. At the third knocking he managed to get up and go to the door. It was a messenger boy with a note.