He hung up the receiver, and, turning, met the pale eye of the long boy, who had propped himself up in the doorway.

“Were you expecting somebody to dinner?” asked the boy.

“Why, yes, old friend, I was.”

“I wish—­”

“Yes?”

“Oh, nothing.”

The waiter left.  The long boy hitched his back more firmly against the doorpost, and returned to his original theme.

“That surely does smell good!” He basked a moment in the aroma.  “Yes, sir!  I’ll tell the world it does!”

Archie was not an abnormally rapid thinker, but he began at this point to get a clearly defined impression that this lad, if invited, would waive the formalities and consent to join his meal.  Indeed, the idea Archie got was that, if he were not invited pretty soon, he would invite himself.

“Yes,” he agreed.  “It doesn’t smell bad, what!”

“It smells good!” said the boy.  “Oh, doesn’t it!  Wake me up in the night and ask me if it doesn’t!”

“Poulet en casserole,” said Archie.

“Golly!” said the boy, reverently.

There was a pause.  The situation began to seem to Archie a trifle difficult.  He wanted to start his meal, but it began to appear that he must either do so under the penetrating gaze of his new friend or else eject the latter forcibly.  The boy showed no signs of ever wanting to leave the doorway.

“You’ve dined, I suppose, what?” said Archie.

“I never dine.”

“What!”

“Not really dine, I mean.  I only get vegetables and nuts and things.”

“Dieting?”

“Mother is.”

“I don’t absolutely catch the drift, old bean,” said Archie.  The boy sniffed with half-closed eyes as a wave of perfume from the poulet en casserole floated past him.  He seemed to be anxious to intercept as much of it as possible before it got through the door.

“Mother’s a food-reformer,” he vouchsafed.  “She lectures on it.  She makes Pop and me live on vegetables and nuts and things.”

Archie was shocked.  It was like listening to a tale from the abyss.

“My dear old chap, you must suffer agonies—­absolute shooting pains!” He had no hesitation now.  Common humanity pointed out his course.  “Would you care to join me in a bite now?”

“Would I!” The boy smiled a wan smile.  “Would I!  Just stop me on the street and ask me!”

“Come on in, then,” said Archie, rightly taking this peculiar phrase for a formal acceptance.  “And close the door.  The fatted calf is getting cold.”

Archie was not a man with a wide visiting-list among people with families, and it was so long since he had seen a growing boy in action at the table that he had forgotten what sixteen is capable of doing with a knife and fork, when it really squares its elbows, takes a deep breath, and gets going.  The spectacle which he witnessed was consequently at first a little unnerving.  The long boy’s idea of trifling with a meal appeared to be to swallow it whole and reach out for more.  He ate like a starving Eskimo.  Archie, in the time he had spent in the trenches making the world safe for the working-man to strike in, had occasionally been quite peckish, but he sat dazed before this majestic hunger.  This was real eating.