“How do you know what I mean?
Why don’t you practise as a doctor, if you like to work so much?”
Dick had made them both wretched by this time, but simultaneously they had become vague with drink and in a moment they forgot; Collis left, and they shook hands warmly.
“Think it over,” said Dick sagely.
“Think what over?”
“You know.”
It had been something about Collis going into his father’s business—good sound advice.
Clay walked off into space.
Dick finished his bottle and then danced with the English girl again, conquering his unwilling body with bold revolutions and stern determined marches down the floor.
The most remarkable thing suddenly happened.
He was dancing with the girl, the music stopped—and she had disappeared.
“Have you seen her?”
“Seen who?”
“The girl I was dancing with.
Su’nly disappeared.
Must be in the building.”
“No!
No!
That’s the ladies’ room.”
He stood up by the bar.
There were two other men there, but he could think of no way of starting a conversation.
He could have told them all about Rome and the violent origins of the Colonna and Gaetani families but he realized that as a beginning that would be somewhat abrupt.
A row of Yenci dolls on the cigar counter fell suddenly to the floor; there was a subsequent confusion and he had a sense of having been the cause of it, so he went back to the cabaret and drank a cup of black coffee.
Collis was gone and the English girl was gone and there seemed nothing to do but go back to the hotel and lie down with his black heart.
He paid his check and got his hat and coat.
There was dirty water in the gutters and between the rough cobblestones; a marshy vapor from the Campagna, a sweat of exhausted cultures tainted the morning air.
A quartet of taxi- drivers, their little eyes bobbing in dark pouches, surrounded him.
One who leaned insistently in his face he pushed harshly away.
“Quanto a Hotel Quirinal?”
“Cento lire.”
Six dollars.
He shook his head and offered thirty lire which was twice the day-time fare, but they shrugged their shoulders as one pair, and moved off.
“Trente-cinque lire e mancie,” he said firmly.
“Cento lire.”
He broke into English.
“To go half a mile?
You’ll take me for forty lire.”
“Oh, no.”
He was very tired.
He pulled open the door of a cab and got in.
“Hotel Quirinal!” he said to the driver who stood obstinately outside the window.
“Wipe that sneer off your face and take me to the Quirinal.”
“Ah, no.”
Dick got out.
By the door of the Bonbonieri some one was arguing with the taxi-drivers, some one who now tried to explain their attitude to Dick; again one of the men pressed close, insisting and gesticulating and Dick shoved him away.
“I want to go to the Quirinal Hotel.”
“He says wan huner lire,” explained the interpreter.
“I understand.
I’ll give him fif’y lire.
Go on away.”