ut, that fellow. He's had a few too many
of 'em. He's getting careless. Now you and I, we're both sober, quiet.
We were the backbone of the Seventh-Story Men. We can go on--”

The Worm, though given to dry and sometimes cryptic ways, was never
rude. That is he never had been. But at this point he walked out of
the apartment and closed the door behind him. He had come in with the
intention of using the telephone. Instead now he walked swiftly through
the Square and on across Sixth Avenue, under the elevated road into
Greenwich Village, where the streets twist curiously, and the hopeless
poor swarm in the little triangular parks, and writers and painters and
sculptors and agitators and idea-venders swarm in the quaint tumble-down
old houses and the less quaint apartment buildings.

He entered one of the latter, pressed one of a row of buttons under a
row of brass mouthpieces. The door clicked. He opened it; walked through
to the rear door on the right.

This door opened slowly, disclosing a tall young woman, very light in
coloring, of a softly curving outline, seeming to bend and sway even
as she stood quietly there; charming to the eye even in the half-light,
fresh of skin, slow, non-committal in speech and of quietly yielding
ways; a young woman with large, almost beautiful, inexpressive eyes. She
wore hat and gloves and carried a light coat.

“You just caught me,” she said.

On the floor by the wall was a hand-bag. Henry Bates eyed this. “Oh,” he
murmured, distrait, “going away!”

“Why--yes. You wanted me?”

“Yes. It's about Sue Wilde.”

She hesitated; then led him into the half-furnished living-room.

“Where is Sue, anyway?”

“When I left her she wras trying to make a fire in a kitchen range. Out
in Jersey.”

“But what on earth--”

“Trouble was she didn't understand about the damper in the pipe. I fixed
that.”

Betty glanced covertly at her wrist watch. “I don't want to appear
unsympathetic,” she said, “but I don't see why she undertakes to
shoulder that family. It's-