“Perhaps he has private means,” suggested little Miss Westlake, who had her own reasons for suspecting this:  reasons bolstered by many and frequent manuscripts, turned over to her for typing, recast, returned for retyping, and again, in many instances, re-recast and re-retyped, the result of the sweating process being advantageous to their literary quality.  Simultaneous advantage had accrued to the typist, also, in a practical way.  Though the total of her bills was modest, it constituted an important extra; and Miss Westlake no longer sought to find solace for her woes through the prescription of the ambulant school of philosophic thought, and to solve her dental difficulties by walking the floor of nights.  Philosophy never yet cured a toothache.  Happily the sufferer was now able to pay a dentist.  Hence Banneker could work, untroubled of her painful footsteps in the adjoining room, and considered the outcome cheap at the price.  He deemed himself an exponent of enlightened selfishness.  Perhaps he was.  But the dim and worn spinster would have given half a dozen of her best and painless teeth to be of service to him.  Now she came to his defense with a pretty dignity: 

“I am sure that Mr. Banneker would not be out of place in any company.”

“Maybe not,” answered the cynical Lambert.  “But where does he get it?  I ask you!”

“Wherever he gets it, no gentleman could be more forehanded in his obligations,” declared Mrs. Brashear.

“But what’s he want to blow it for in a shirty place like Sherry’s?” marveled young Wickert.

“Wyncha ask him?” brutally demanded Hainer.

Wickert examined his mind hastily, and was fain to admit inwardly that he had wanted to ask him, but somehow felt “skittish” about it.  Outwardly he retorted, being displeased at his own weakness, “Ask him yourself.”

Had any one questioned the subject of the discussion at Mrs. Brashear’s on this point, even if he were willing to reply to impertinent interrogations (a high improbability of which even the hardy Wickert seems to have had some timely premonition), he would perhaps have explained the glorified routine of his day-off, by saying that he went to Sherry’s and the opening nights for the same reason that he prowled about the water-front and ate in polyglot restaurants on obscure street-corners east of Tompkins Square; to observe men and women and the manner of their lives.  It would not have been a sufficient answer; Banneker must have admitted that to himself.  Too much a man of the world in many strata not to be adjustable to any of them, nevertheless he felt more attuned to and at one with his environment amidst the suave formalism of Sherry’s than in the more uneasy and precarious elegancies of an East-Side Tammany Association promenade and ball.

Some of the youngsters of The Ledger said that he was climbing.