ONLY PERSONS IN COSTUME ADMITTED. DON'T MISS
THE DARING GARDEN OF EDEN BALLET AND
MASQUE AT FOUR A.M.
"Are you a Greenwich Villager?" asked Tidbury.
Mr. Hydeman smiled at the note of horror in Tidbury's voice.
"Oh, I hang out down there," he admitted airily.
"And you're going to the Pagan Rout?"
Even into the seclusion of Calais, Maine, and Mrs. Kelty's, rumors of
that revel had filtered.
"I never miss one," replied Mr. Hydeman grandly. "And say, I've a
costume this year that's a knockout."
"You have?"
"Yes. I've got a preacher's outfit. Can you imagine me a parson?"
Weakly Tidbury said he couldn't.
"And say," went on Mr. Hydeman, lowering his voice to a confidential
whisper, "I'll have a flask of hip oil on me."
"Hip oil?"
"Sure. Diamond juice."
"Diamond juice?"
"Aw, hooch. For me and the gal."
"The girl?" quavered Tidbury.
"Say," demanded Mr. Hydeman, "did you think I was going to take a
hippopotamus with me?"
Tidbury's small face was pathetic.
"You don't know what you're missing, Tid," Mr. Hydeman rattled on. "It's
a real naughty party. Those costumes! Oh, bebe." Mr. Hydeman rolled his
eyes toward the roof and blew thither a kiss. "Last year there was a
Cleopatra there and she didn't have a thing on her but a pair of----"
"The cashier's waiting for these figures," mumbled Mr. Epps. "I've got
to go to him."
He heard Hydeman's sniggle of laughter behind him.
That evening the desperate Tidbury met Martha Ritter as she was leaving
the hat company's building.
"May I come to see you to-night?" he asked, trying not to stammer, and
hoping his ears were not as red as they felt. "There's a nice band
concert in Prospect Park and I thought----"
Martha Ritter cocked her head to one side and smiled mysteriously.
"I'm sorry, Mr. Epps," she said coolly, "but I have an engagement."
"You--have--an--engagement?" He repeated the words as if they were a
prison sentence.
"Yes."
"Where?"
"Oh, it's a masquerade." She smiled, her head on one side.
"Whom are you going with?" he blurted; he was trembling.
"That would be telling," she laughed. "Well, good night, Mr. Epps. I
must hurry home and get my costume on. I'm going as a gypsy."
And she disappeared into the maw of the Subway.
A masquerade! In gypsy costume! Tidbury was struck by the lightning of
complete realization; he understood Hydeman's leer now. Feebly he leaned
against a lamp-post until his numbed brain could recover from the
impact. Then he committed a sin. Deliberately he kicked the lamp-post a
vicious kick.
"Darn it all," he muttered through clenched teeth. "Yes, gosh darn it
all!"
Then he went wearily to his boarding house. Morosely he ate of Mrs.
Kelty's boiled beef and bread pudding; morosely he sat in his lonely
stall of a bedroom and glowered at a hole in the red carpet.
"I'm too quiet. Too darn quiet," he kept saying to himself in a sort of
litany. "Yes, too gosh darn quiet."
And when he thought of Martha, sweet simple Martha, and so short a time
ago his Martha, at the Pagan Rout with Hydeman, surrounded by indecorous
and no doubt inebriate denizens of Greenwich Village, his head all but
burst. That she was lost, and, most poignant thought of all, lost to
him, kept beating in upon his brain. He moaned.
Suddenly his spine straightened with a terrible resolve. His small
guileless face was set in lines of stern decision. He leaped from his
chair, dived under his brass bed, rummaged in his trunk and fished up
twenty-five hard-saved dollars in a sock.
Clapping his hat on his head in emulation of the tilt of Mr. Hydeman's
hat Tidbury issued forth. In the hall he passed Mrs. Kelty, who regarded
him with some surprise.
"You're not going out, Mr. Epps?" she asked. "Why, it's after nine!"
"I am going out, Mrs. Kelty," announced Tidbury Epps.
"Back soon?"
"I may never come back," he answered hollowly.
"Sakes alive! Where are you going?"
"I am going," said Tidbury Epps firmly, "to the devil."
And he strode into the night.