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By Root 1547 0

and friendly. She wasn’t sore. It was just that he had been the right guy and last night had been the right time. His eye caught a girl, neat, all right, walking past the restaurant on the north side of Seventy-first Street. He hoped she would be getting on the train, and he’d happen to sit next to her and they’d get to talking. He was kind of a bastard, and yet, she was damn neat. He lit a cigarette and let his glance trail wistfully after her. Last night had made him think of broads, and he’d had them on his mind all morning, naked broads, and he had kept thinking of making them, harems of them. And it was all damn dirty and unfair to Catherine. But a guy couldn’t always help himself. Thoughts popped into his bean, and anyway he hadn’t done anything but think about them. She was turning around the bank corner, gone. The world was sure full of broads. And this week, he’d had that Jackson bitch and Catherine. He must have some sex appeal to Catherine. He was going to marry her and he liked her, and other girls, they were just umm, nice orders of pork chops on the side, as poor Paulie Haggerty used to say. He saw himself when he was an old man, fondly remembering all the girls he had laid, from Iris down the line. And suppose he still had it in him when he was seventy? He still had years of it to go anyway and that was something sweet.

The warning bells distracted him. He looked eastward down the track at the approaching train and stepped back as it pulled alongside of the platform. Tossing aside his cigarette, he figured that he wouldn’t smoke if he avoided the smoker, and he entered a car in the center of the train. The train rolled forward, and walking in the car aisle he looked to see if there were any girls he might sit next to, or anyone he knew. He took an unoccupied seat in the middle, by a window, and looked out as the train passed houses, vacant lots, people walking along Seventy-first Street.

When he saw Catherine, should he or shouldn’t he mention last night?

“I saw her yesterday on Seventy-first Street, and do you know, she’s wearing the same hat she wore last spring?” a stout lady behind him said to a middle-aged woman.

The train shunted through a tunnel, and Studs developed an anxiety to be out of the tunnel.

“Of course, I don’t wish ill of anyone. But she put on so many airs when she had it, that it serves her right.”

The train broke into daylight again and rumbled into the Sixty-seventh Street station. He watched several men and women moving about the platform to enter the cars, and he thought of Catherine, of how he had met her. She had been a distant friend or something to the Dowsons, and anyway he had met her when his sister, Fran, had married Carroll. He remembered that Phil Dowson, Carroll’s twin brother, who had married Gertrude O’Reilly, the niece of Judge Joe O’Reilly, had introduced her to him and she had said how do you do, or something like that, and he had just acknowledged the introduction in a formal way. She had looked a little fat, and not so hot that time. But there had been dancing, and since he happened to be standing next to her and there was no one else to dance with, he’d asked her to dance, out of politeness. She’d said something about his dancing nice, and he’d liked the compliment so he had asked her to dance again.

“Just as my husband, Arthur, says, he believes in the philosophy of compensation, and when you do something, there’s always compensation for it. It’s only a compensation to her now that her husband is not doing well because she was always flaunting herself and her clothes when she had it,” one of the women behind him said.

Regular hen party there, he thought. But, anyway, at Fran’s wedding, when Catherine was leaving, he had walked over to her and he’d said, because of some crazy impulse or other, that he might be seeing her again. And she had smiled and said that would certainly be something to look forward to, so they had made a date then and there. He’d been sorry he’d made the date after she’d left, but it had been done, so he’d taken her to a show, and he