A month, six weeks, two months went by, and George heard nothing from the man. It was well into the new year before he saw him again, and then by accident.
A young lady had invited George to have lunch with her at an expensive speak-easy. As soon as they entered the place George saw his millionaire friend sitting alone at one of the tables. Immediately George uttered a cry of joy and started across the room to meet him with his hand outstretched, and in such precipitate haste that he fell sprawling across an intervening table and two chairs. When he picked himself up from the floor, the man had drawn back with an expression of surprise and perplexity on his face, but he unbent sufficiently to take the young man’s proffered hand and to say coolly, in an amused and tolerant voice:
“Ah—it’s our writer friend again? How are you?”
The young man’s crestfallen confusion and embarrassment were so evident that the rich man’s heart was quite touched. His distant manner thawed out instantly, and now nothing would do but that George should bring the young lady over to the millionaire’s table so that they could all have lunch together.
During the course of the meal the man became very friendly and attentive. It seemed he just couldn’t do enough for George. He kept helping him to various dishes and filling his glass with more wine. And whenever George turned to him he would find the man looking at him with an expression of such obvious sympathy and commiseration that finally he felt compelled to ask him what the trouble was.
“Ah,” he said, shaking his head with a doleful sigh, “I was mighty sorry when I read about it.”
“Read about what?”
“Why,” he said, “the prize.”
“What prize?”
“But didn’t you read about it in the paper? Didn’t you see what happened?”
“I don’t know what you are talking about,” said George, puzzled. “What did happen?”
“Why,” he said, “you didn’t get it.”
“Didn’t get what?”
“The prize!” he cried—“the prize!”—mentioning a literary prize that was awarded every year. “I thought you would be sure to get it, but”—he paused a moment, then went on sorrowfully—“they gave it to another man…You got mentioned…you were runner-up…but”—he shook his head gloomily—“you didn’t get it.”
So much for his gocd friend, the millionaire. George never saw him again after that. And yet, let no one say that he was ever bitter.
Then there was Dorothy.
Dorothy belonged to that fabulous and romantic upper crust of New York “Society” which sleeps by day and begins to come awake at sunset and never seems to have any existence at all outside of the better-known hot spots of the town. She had been expensively educated for a life of fashion, she had won a reputation in her set for being quite an intellectual because she had been known to read a book, and so, of course, when George Webber’s novel was listed as a best seller she bought it and left it lying around in prominent places in her apartment. Then she wrote the author a scented note, asking him to come and have a cocktail with her. He did, and at her urging he went back to see her again and again.
Dorothy was no longer as young as she had been, but she was well built, had kept her figure and her face, and was not a bad-looking wench. She had never married, and apparently felt she did not need to, for it was freely whispered about that she seldom slept alone. One heard that she had bestowed her favours not only upon all the gentlemen of her own set, but also upon such casual gallants as the milkmen on her family’s estate, stray taxi-drivers, writers of da-da, professional bicycle riders, wasteland poets, and plug-ugly bruisers with flat feet and celluloid collars. So George had expected their friendship to come quickly to its full flower, and he was quite surprised and disappointed when nothing happened.
His evenings with Dorothy turned out to be quiet and serious t?te-?-t?tes devoted to highly intellectual conversation. Dorothy remained as chaste as a nun, and George began to wonder whether she had not been grossly maligned by evil tongues. He found her intellectual and aesthetic interests rather on the dull side, and was several times on the point of giving her up in sheer boredom. But always she would pursue him, sending him notes and letters written in a microscopic hand on paper edged with red, and he would go back again, partly out of curiosity and a desire to find out what it was the woman was after.