Page:Christopher Morley--Tales from a rolltop desk.djvu/144

princess in a Norse fairy tale? The old man was a lunatic, we supposed, and would come to grief sooner or later. We were not going to be the ones to bring humiliation upon him.

"We walked back, stricken, to our lodgings; and as we passed the Physical Culture Chophouse we looked furtively through the window. We could see Gloria laying the tables for lunch, the tall, strong curve of her back as she leaned over, her capable white hands smoothing the cloth. None of us had the heart to go in.

"We clubbed together to pay for Mrs. Vesey's new supply of coal, although it broke our pocketbooks for the next month or so. We were too hard up, then, to go on eating at Larsen's. We had to patronize a lunch-counter instead, where we gloomed over frankfurters and beans and quarrelled with one another, in sheer misery, as to which one of us Gloria had really liked best. We never saw her again, because about a week later the Larsen café shut up, and they disappeared."

"And the calisthenics?" I said. "Did you go on with those?"

"No," he said; "we were too melancholy. Also, as soon as Mrs. Vesey's coal arrived, we didn't need to. That was the terrible part of it. You see, Gloria had simply egged us on to do those exercises