I MET him again in this way: The revolving door of the excessively
fashionable St. Erdman Hotel was spinning around furiously—and yet no
one came forth. My eye spied this phenomenon; and, ever curious, I
paused on Fifth Avenue and watched. Round and round sped the door like
the Ferris Wheel in a squirrel cage propelled by an athletic squirrel
gone mad. So fast did the door revolve that with difficulty I made out a
small figure in a brown suit in one of the compartments. It was he who
was making a whirligig of the door. Then I saw another figure, very
bulky and cholerically red in the face and wearing the purple-and-gold
livery of the hotel, stop the buzzing door and with outraged thumb and
forefinger pick up the little man in brown by the collar, pop him out of
the door like a tiddleywink and send him bouncing across the sidewalk in
my direction. The little man picked himself up, apparently not in the
least angry, cast not a single malediction at the broad purple back of
the doorman, but began to brush himself off thoughtfully. Then I saw
that he was Hosmer Appleby, with whom I had had a casual acquaintance in
college some five years before.
“Why hello, Appleby,” I greeted him. “Are you hurt?”
“I shall not have one,” was his reply. “I do not like them.”
I stared at Appleby, uncertain whether he was dazed by his recent
experience, or was perhaps psychopathic, or had been drinking.
“You do not like what?” I queried.
“Revolving doors,” he said. “I’ve tried them in seven buildings now, and
I don’t like any of them. No; I shan’t have one. That’s settled.”
He addressed me as if I were trying to compel him to have a revolving
door, willy-nilly.
“There, there,” I said soothingly, convinced now that his mind was
affected. “You need not have revolving doors if you don’t want them.”
“But what kind shall I have?” he demanded, looking at me anxiously.
“What kind would you have?”
“Have? For what?”
“Why, for your house, of course,” he said.
“But I have no house, Appleby.”