She gave him one of her sweetest smiles and Clyde was quite beside himself with satisfaction.
To think that she would break a date for him, at last.
Her eyes were warm with favor and her mouth wreathed with a smile.
“Surest thing you know,” he exclaimed, voicing the slang of the hotel boys.
“You bet I’ll be there.
Will you do me a favor?”
“What is it?” she asked cautiously.
“Wear that little black hat with the red ribbon under your chin, will you? You look so cute in that.”
“Oh, you,” she laughed.
It was so easy to kid Clyde.
“Yes, I’ll wear it,” she added.
“But you gotta go now.
Here comes that old fish.
I know he’s going to kick.
But I don’t care.
Six-thirty, eh?
So long.”
She turned to give her attention to a new customer, an old lady who had been patiently waiting to inquire if she could tell her where the muslins were sold.
And Clyde, tingling with pleasure because of this unexpected delight vouchsafed him, made his way most elatedly to the nearest exit.
He was not made unduly curious because of this sudden favor, and the next evening, promptly at six-thirty, and in the glow of the overhanging arc-lights showering their glistening radiance like rain, she appeared.
As he noted, at once, she had worn the hat he liked.
Also she was enticingly ebullient and friendly, more so than at any time he had known her.
Before he had time to say that she looked pretty, or how pleased he was because she wore that hat, she began:
“Some favorite you’re gettin’ to be, I’LL SAY, when I’LL break an engagement and then wear an old hat I don’t like just to please you.
How do I get that way is what I’d like to know.”
He beamed as though he had won a great victory.
Could it be that at last he might be becoming a favorite with her?
“If you only knew how cute you look in that hat, Hortense, you wouldn’t knock it,” he urged admiringly.
“You don’t know how sweet you do look.”
“Oh, ho.
In this old thing?” she scoffed. “You certainly are easily pleased, I’ll say.”
“An’ your eyes are just like soft, black velvet,” he persisted eagerly.
“They’re wonderful.”
He was thinking of an alcove in the Green–Davidson hung with black velvet.
“Gee, you certainly have got ’em to-night,” she laughed, teasingly.
“I’ll have to do something about you.”
Then, before he could make any reply to this, she went off into an entirely fictional account of how, having had a previous engagement with a certain alleged young society man — Tom Keary by name — who was dogging her steps these days in order to get her to dine and dance, she had only this evening decided to “ditch” him, preferring Clyde, of course, for this occasion, anyhow.
And she had called Keary up and told him that she could not see him to-night — called it all off, as it were.
But just the same, on coming out of the employee’s entrance, who should she see there waiting for her but this same Tom Keary, dressed to perfection in a bright gray raglan and spats, and with his closed sedan, too.
And he would have taken her to the Green- Davidson, if she had wanted to go.
He was a real sport.
But she didn’t.
Not to-night, anyhow.
Yet, if she had not contrived to avoid him, he would have delayed her.
But she espied him first and ran the other way.
“And you should have just seen my little feet twinkle up Sargent and around the corner into Bailey Place,” was the way she narcissistically painted her flight.
And so infatuated was Clyde by this picture of herself and the wonderful Keary that he accepted all of her petty fabrications as truth.
And then, as they were walking in the direction of Gaspie’s, a restaurant in Wyandotte near Tenth which quite lately he had learned was much better than Frissell’s, Hortense took occasion to pause and look in a number of windows, saying as she did so that she certainly did wish that she could find a little coat that was becoming to her — that the one she had on was getting worn and that she must have another soon — a predicament which caused Clyde to wonder at the time whether she was suggesting to him that he get her one.
Also whether it might not advance his cause with her if he were to buy her a little jacket, since she needed it.
But Rubenstein’s coming into view on this same side of the street, its display window properly illuminated and the coat in full view, Hortense paused as she had planned.