Page:Christopher Morley--Tales from a rolltop desk.djvu/41

 bling inwardly, he met her gaze as coolly as he might.

'Come to Moretti's to-night?" he asked.

"I'm sorry; I've got a date to-night."

He ached in spirit. "To-morrow night?"

She hesitated a moment, tapping the desk with a rosy finger nail. Then her face brightened. "I'd love to."

As he returned to his desk and the dull routine of writing press notes for Petunia Veal's latest novel, he uttered a phrase that he had caught from Harry Hanover. It was the first sign of his emancipation from Mallarmé and the Oxford Movement, for certainly that phrase had never been heard on the quilted lawns of Balliol: "She's a prize package, all right, all right!"

Ten days elapsed. All six sonnets had been delivered and paid for, and Mr. Arundel had bargained for a few extra rondeaux, at five dollars each.

Antipasto, minestrone, breadsticks, force-meat balls, and here we are again at the spaghetti and Hackensack Chianti. Lester had mailed his MS. on "Clara Tice and the Pleinaerists of Greenwich Village" to the Oblique Review that afternoon, and had calculated that the editors could not in any decency offer him less than fifty—or perhaps