They passed Forty-fifth Street and slowed down slightly. Both of them lit cigarettes and blew tremendous clouds of smoke and frosted breath into the air.
"Let's walk up to the Plaza and have an egg-nog," suggested Anthony. "Do you good. Air'll get the rotten nicotine out of your lungs. Come on--I'll let you talk about your book all the way."
"I don't want to if it bores you. I mean you needn't do it as a favor." The words tumbled out in haste, and though he tried to keep his face casual it screwed up uncertainly. Anthony was compelled to protest: "Bore me? I should say not!"
"Got a cousin--" began Dick, but Anthony interrupted by stretching out his arms and breathing forth a low cry of exultation.
"Good weather!" he exclaimed, "isn't it? Makes me feel about ten. I mean it makes me feel as I should have felt when I was ten. Murderous! Oh, God! one minute it's my world, and the next I'm the world's fool. To-day it's my world and everything's easy, easy. Even Nothing is easy!"
"Got a cousin up at the Plaza. Famous girl. We can go up and meet her. She lives there in the winter--has lately anyway--with her mother and father."
"Didn't know you had cousins in New York."
"Her name's Gloria. She's from home--Kansas City. Her mother's a practising Bilphist, and her father's quite dull but a perfect gentleman."
"They try to be. All the old man does is tell me he just met the most wonderful character for a novel. Then he tells me about some idiotic friend of his and then he says: '_There_'s a character for you! Why don't you write him up? Everybody'd be interested in _him_.' Or else he tells me about Japan or Paris, or some other very obvious place, and says: 'Why don't you write a story about that place? That'd be a wonderful setting for a story!'"
"How about the girl?" inquired Anthony casually, "Gloria--Gloria what?"
"Gilbert. Oh, you've heard of her--Gloria Gilbert. Goes to dances at colleges--all that sort of thing."
"Good-looking--in fact damned attractive."
They reached Fiftieth Street and turned over toward the Avenue.
"I don't care for young girls as a rule," said Anthony, frowning.
This was not strictly true. While it seemed to him that the average debutante spent every hour of her day thinking and talking about what the great world had mapped out for her to do during the next hour, any girl who made a living directly on her prettiness interested him enormously.