But a fortnight passed without Lorrimer’s appearing at the restaurant and, when at last he did come, Dickie, flying to his chair, was greeted by a cold, unsmiling word, and a businesslike quotation from the menu.  He felt as though he had been struck.  His face burned.  In the West, a fellow couldn’t do that and get away with it!  He tightened an impotent, thin fist.  He filled the order and kept his distance, and, absurdly enough, gave Lorrimer’s tip to another waiter and went without his own dinner.  For the first time in his life a sense of social inferiority, of humiliation concerning the nature of his work, came to him.  He felt the pang of servitude, a pang unknown to the inhabitants of frontier towns.  When Sheila washed dishes for Mrs. Hudson she was “the young lady from Noo York who helps round at Hudson’s house.”  Dickie fought this shame sturdily, but it seemed to cling, to have a sticky pervasiveness.  Try as he might he couldn’t brush it off his mind.  Nevertheless, it was on the very heels of this embittering experience that life plucked him up from his slough.  One of the leveling public catastrophes came to Dickie’s aid—­not that he knew he was a dumb prayer for aid.  He knew only that every day was harder to face than the last, that every night the stars up there through Sheila’s skylight seemed to glimmer more dully with less inspiration on his fagged spirit.

The sluggish monotony of the restaurant’s existence was stirred that September night by a big neighboring fire.  Waiters and guests tumbled out to the call of fire-engines and running feet.  Dickie found himself beside Lorrimer, who caught him by the elbow.

“Keep by me, kid,” he said, and there was something in his tone that softened injury.  “If you want a good look-in, I can get through the ropes.”

He showed his card to a policeman, pulled Dickie after him, and they found themselves in an inner circle of the inferno.  Before them a tall, hideous warehouse broke forth into a horrible beauty.  It was as though a tortured soul had burst bars.  It roared and glowed and sent up petals of smoky rose and seeds of fire against the blue-black sky.  The crowds pressed against the ropes and turned up their faces to drink in the terror of the spectacle.

Lorrimer had out his notebook.  “Damn fires!” he said.  “They bore me.  Does all this look like anything to you?  That fire and those people and their silly faces all tilted up and turned red and blue and purple—­”

He was talking to himself, and so, really, was Dickie when he made his own statement in a queer tone of frightened awe.  “They look like a flower garden in Hell,” he whispered.

Lorrimer threw up his chin.  “Say that again, will you?” he snapped out.  “Go on!  Don’t stop!  Tell me everything that comes into your damn young head of a wandering Martian!  Fly at it!  I’ll take you down.”

“You mean,” said Dickie, “tell you what I think this looks like?”