Irving Watters, the school-clinic dentist, and a young doctor from the city clinic, the telephone bell summoned him to an excited but saccharine:
"This is Orchid. Are you glad I called up?"
"Oh, yes, yes, mighty glad you called up." He tried to make it at once amorously joyful, and impersonal enough to beguile the three coatless, beer-swizzling, grinning doctors.
"Are you doing anything this evening, Marty?"
"Just, uh, couple fellows here for a little game cards."
"Oh!" It was acute. "Oh, then you— I was such a baby to call you up, but Daddy is away and Verbena and everybody, and it was such a lovely evening, and I just thought— Do you think I'm an awful little silly?"
"No—no—sure not."
"I'm so glad you don't. I'd hate it if I thought you thought I was just a silly to call you up. You don't, do you?"
"No—no—course not. Look, I've got to—"
"I know. I mustn't keep you. But I just wanted you to tell me whether you thought I was a silly to—"
"No! Honest! Really!"
Three fidgety minutes later, deplorably aware of masculine snickers from behind him, he escaped. The poker-players said all the things considered suitable in Nautilus: "Oh, you little Don Jewen!" and "Can you beat it—his wife only gone for a week!" and "Who is she, Doctor? Go on, you tightwad, bring her up here!" and "Say, I know who it is; it's that little milliner on Prairie Avenue."
Next noon she telephoned from a drug store that she had lain awake all night, and on profound contemplation decided that they "mustn't ever do that sort of thing again"—and would he meet her at the corner of Crimmins Street and Missouri Avenue at eight, so that they might talk it all over?
In the afternoon she telephoned and changed the tryst to half-past eight.
At five she called him up just to remind him—
In the laboratory that day Martin transplanted cultures no more. He was too confusedly human to be a satisfactory experimenter, too coldly thinking to be a satisfactory sinful male, and all the while he longed for the sure solace of Leora.
"I can go as far as I like with her to-night.
"But she's a brainless man-chaser.
"All the better. I'm tired of being a punk philosopher.
