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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
In "The Lorenzo Bunch," Booth Tarkington presents a poignant exploration of adolescence, societal expectations, and the complexities of friendship. Set against the backdrop of early 20th-century America, the novel employs Tarkington's characteristic blend of rich detail, humor, and psychological depth, evoking the nuanced experiences of its young protagonists. The narrative is charged with a deep sense of realism, reflecting the author's keen observations of human behavior and social dynamics, which establish a multifaceted literary context within the broader scope of American literature during this era. Booth Tarkington, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, drew from his own Midwestern upbringing to create relatable characters and scenarios in "The Lorenzo Bunch." His early experiences with friendship and communal expectations informed his portrayal of the dilemmas faced by youth. Tarkington'Äôs mastery of character development and wit reveals a profound understanding of the transitional phases in life, which resonate deeply with readers, underscoring the universality of his themes. This novel is highly recommended for readers interested in psychological fiction that captures the intricacies of growing up. Tarkington'Äôs insightful narrative will appeal to those who appreciate a blend of humor and seriousness, making "The Lorenzo Bunch" a timeless exploration of the adolescent experience.
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The Lorenzo Bunch
Table of Contents
I
As the earlier of the two afternoon programs at the Garfield Avenue Theater was completed and a sparse procession of patrons emerged to the sidewalk, an imported closed automobile stopped before the entrance and a colored chauffeur, neat in dark grey, opened the door of the rear compartment. Chauffeurs and such cars being by no means a matter of course before that theater, a few of the recent audience paused to stare mildly as a stoutish fair young man of what seemed to the observers an aristocratic appearance stepped forth from the interior of this costly machine, sauntered to the box-office in the lobby, bought a ticket and entered the theater.
Inside, the lights were still on for the interval; he paused for a moment at the outer end of an aisle, glanced over the scattered clumps of people still remaining in their seats, then determined where he would sit and passed down the aisle, removing his tan suede gloves as he went. Far forward, he paused again, glanced back idly over the audience, as if for no reason; then took an aisle seat in the third row from the front, and looked back again over his shoulder casually. After that, however, facing the vacant screen, he seemed to compose himself for the entertainment.
He had attracted the attention of two young matrons who sat at about the middle of the house. “Look, Arlene,” one of them said to the other. “There’s that fellow again.”
“Which fellow you mean, hon?”
“You know. The one with the New York-looking hat and gloves and cane—only to-day he’s got a blue suit on and the other times it was grey with a zippy blue handkerchief in the breast pocket. Don’t you remember?”
“Yes,” the other said absently. “You mean the blond that just sat down in the third row, don’t you?”
“Yeppy. Who you s’pose he was looking round for, Arlene?”
“Search me, Mabel!”
The fashionable young man in the third row, turning slightly in his chair, once more gave the audience behind him a seemingly casual survey, this time a longer one. The face he thus reciprocally exhibited to them was of an evenly pale comeliness; though about the blue eyes were the somewhat puffy modelings often characteristic of plump fair young men for whom dissipation is the only escape from boredom. Upon his upper lip a mustache little more than a blond hint of manliness seemed to one of the two young matrons already discussing him a final exquisite proof of his modishness.
“I do love a man to look like that, Arlene,” she said. “Cream de la cream all over, huh? I been trying I don’t know how long to make Art sport a handkerchief in his chest pocket and grow a mustache only as wide as his nose like that. Those little twin mustaches give ’em that Ritzy look, don’t you say so, hon? Why’n’t you make Roy grow one?”
“Roy?” Arlene laughed briefly at the suggestion that she could make her husband do anything fashionable—or perhaps at the suggestion that she could make him do anything at all. “Talk sense!”
“Look!” Mabel was suddenly excited. “He’s looking straight at us! Look, he’s keeping on looking at us, Arlene. Look, he looks like he thinks he knows us!” She giggled. “What’s he think he’s trying to do, pick us up?”
“Sh!” Arlene whispered, and looked indifferently away from the fashionable young man who continued to stare in their direction. “Better not talk so loud.”
The lights went out, and a fragmentary affair called a “pre-view” began flatly to be visible upon the vivid screen; but Mabel couldn’t immediately stop tingling over the young man whom they now saw as only the vaguest silhouette of shoulders and head. “He’s stopped looking; but I bet he was, Arlene. I bet anything he was wondering if he couldn’t make us.”
“No, I don’t think so.”
Mabel persisted. “But look, listen here! This is the third time we’ve seen him here. He was here the day last week I wore my plaid skirt and Madam Thompson hat, and then he was here Friday aft and look, it’s only Monday and here he is again! He rubbered around a good deal those other times, too, don’t you remember? But this is the first time he’s spotted us. Honest, I think that was kind of a funny look he gave us. It looked like the look you give somebody when you’ve been looking for ’em quite a while and just spotted ’em.” She giggled again. “I bet my old Art’d be sore if he was here and saw it! Honest, hon, what I better do if he gets up and follows us when we go out? S’pose he does speak to me, what I better do?”
“He won’t speak to you,” Arlene said calmly. “Don’t worry, Mabe.”
Her tone was quietly that of a woman who knows what she’s talking about; but Mabel was too pleased with the prospect of a slight adventure to be easily convinced. “He certainly was looking at one of us, Arlene.” Then she felt it the part of friendship to be modest or at least fair-minded. “The reason I’m pretty sure it’s me, it’s because he couldn’t seen you as well, account of people between, as he could me. Gosh Pete, I bet Art’d be mad! Anything like the slightest liberty always gets Art sore.” She giggled again; then presently her attention became concentrated upon the screen, drawn there by the pictured appearances of far remote persons to whom she was unknown but with whom she nevertheless enjoyed an unctuous kind of intimacy. “Claud Barnes and Myrta Beal! Say, hon, that’s good camera-work, too, you know it? Myrta won’t make any more pictures without Claud and’s going to get her divorce this month and marry him. They been crazy about each other ever since they did ‘Hearts of Fire’ together. He used to be prackly cuckoo over Paula Oberlin.”
“No,” Arlene said. “It was Marie Loner; she took dope. Oh, look! Myrta’s going to get her sport clothes torn in the bushes again, same as she did in ‘Rough House’, and he’ll pin ’em together with thorns for her the way he did then; you watch. What’ll you bet he doesn’t?”
Mabel wisely declined to bet anything, and the two became absorbed in the story revealed before them, in spite of the fact that the pattern of this revelation was familiar to them, and the fact also that they felt so personal an intimacy with the two principal actors that these lost all illusion of being other than Mr. Claud Barnes and Miss Myrta Beal. “Look,” Mabel whispered. “Claud’s going to get in trouble now; Myrta’s husband’s got a gun.” Not pausing, she murmured eagerly of the clothes worn by Miss Beal. “Myrta never wears it cut lower’n about fourteen inches in the back. Her back’s not so good; that’s why she runs to these opera cloaks. Look, lined with white ermine every inch of it! What you bet it cost, hon?”
Mabel had almost forgotten the fashionable blond young man; but, when the disks of film had spun out sound and picture for something like an hour more, Arlene said, “Here’s where we came in,” the two rose for departure, and Mabel’s previous excitement returned. There was the clatter of a walking-stick falling to the floor near the front of the house, and, as the pair of young matrons reached the aisle and turned toward the outer doors, Mabel clutched her friend’s arm and whispered, “Wha’d I tell you? That fellow’s following us out. Didn’t I tell you!”
“Come on,” Arlene said in a dry voice, and strode with some rapidity to the open lobby, where the smoked yellow twilight of the October day showed her to be a tall, rather thin young woman with a thin, handsome face. She had brown hair, not touched with bronze or any ruddiness; her grey eyes were cool and reticent. She looked knowing, experienced and what is called likeable.
Neither her black plain hat, rather large, nor her dark clothes were worn to compel the gaze of passers-by, though this couldn’t well be said of the green beret, yellow coat and tan skirt of her blonde little friend, Mabel. Arlene had once told her husband, Roy Parker, in confidence, that Mabel looked like a plump little pink-and-white pig made pretty, a true enough caricature; though Arlene had modified it conscientiously by adding that Mabel was a lively little thing, awful dumb but nice to run around with.
Mabel just now, in the lobby of the Garfield Avenue Theater, was livelier than Arlene wished her to be. “Hay! Don’t walk so fast, hon. I simply got to see if I’m not right.” So swift was Arlene’s long-legged stride that her loose coat breezed out behind her, and Mabel detained her only by grasping it. “Wait, Arlene! I bet you anything you like he’s right behind us and——”
Her voice collapsed into a delighted gasp as the young man came quickly out into the lobby by way of the door that had just closed itself behind them. Arlene, moving toward the sidewalk, did not look round; though she was as well aware of him as was her excited companion. Mabel suffered a disappointment; the young man spoke, but not to her.
“Ah—Mrs. Parker,” he said. “Ah—just a moment, please, Mrs. Parker.” Arlene walked on a few steps as if she intended to make no response whatever. He spoke more urgently. “Just a moment, Arlene, please!” She frowned, showed annoyance plainly; but paused. He lifted his hat, glanced at Mabel and asked, “Will you give me just a moment, Mrs. Parker?”
It was clear that he meant a moment aside with him, out of Mabel’s hearing. Arlene hesitated, then said, “Oh—well!” in the tone of one who finds it necessary to humor some importunate inferior and be done with it.
Mabel perceived that manners really compelled her to move on, as if indifferently, to a little distance, out of earshot. Piqued for herself and aglow with an almost stinging curiosity, she did this, and, pretending to be interested in Garfield Avenue’s passing traffic, watched Arlene and the fashionable young man as they stood together at one side of the lobby. Mabel’s impression was that the young man, though he kept his face impassive, put forth some request, pressing it upon Arlene, and that Arlene, less genial than usual, refused to grant it. Obviously laconic with him, she was seen to shake her head several times as he talked; then she decisively turned away from him and moved to rejoin her friend upon the sidewalk.
He followed, as if to renew his urgings; but, nearing Mabel, shrugged his shoulders slightly and strolled obliquely upon his own way. His chauffeur, across the street, had seen him and brought the impressive car to the curb before the theater; the young man stepped within and swept nobly away.
Mabel, clutching her friend’s arm as they began to walk toward home, gasped again. “Pete’s sakes, look at that million-dollar car! Listen, but ain’t you mysterious, Arlene! You knew him all the time! Who is he?”
Arlene, walking briskly, seemed to wish to regard the incident as closed. “Oh, just a fellow.”
II
Mabel watched the fine car as it turned westward at the next corner. “Look. Crossing over to Gillespie Boulevard. I bet he lives on Gillespie Boulevard—with that car!—or else out in Goldwood. Did you know that’s what they call Oldwood Park now? They call it ‘Goldwood’. Bet he lives in Goldwood and going to drive out Gillespie Boulevard. D’you know they say Goldwood is even on top of Gillespie Boulevard socially? Honest, hon, aren’t you going to come across? Where’d you ever know that bird?”
“When I was cashier at the Griswold,” Arlene said. “I knew about every fellow in town when I was at the Griswold; they’d all come in there.”
“Say, honest, what you want to keep on being so mysterious for? I and you’ve belonged to the bunch about three years now and I’ve heard you say you quit the Griswold five years before that. Isn’t that straight?”
“Yes,” Arlene said. “I stayed on at the Griswold five years after Roy and I were married, on account of the salary; but I quit when little Ola was four years old so’s to devote more time to the child. Ola’s going on thirteen now. I was only twenty when Roy and I were married, and he was just four months older’n I was. Roy’s almost thirty-four now; he’ll be thirty-four the seventeenth of——”
“Listen!” Mabel openly showed irritation. “I know how old you and Roy and Ola are, and how old you were when you were married and everything, don’t I? Haven’t you ever seen that bird since you were at the Griswold?”
“Hardly more’n to say hello to on the street.”
“Oh, all right!” Mabel said, and took pains to let both her annoyance and her skepticism be audible in her voice. “Have it your own way. Why, certainly!”
“What’s the matter? What you sore about, Mabe?”
“Oh, nothing! Have it your own way, Arlene.”
The two young women walked on for some distance without speaking, Mabel being silent because of petulance, Arlene because of a meditation that engaged her. Mabel’s pretty, pink, piggish face showed painted lips resentfully pouting and artificially sparse eyebrows thinly scowling; Arlene thought she’d better take these distortions as a warning. Charlie Rice and Ed Stem and other husbands in their group often said Mabe Finch might be dumb but anyhow was the best little pal in the bunch, and that was really because Mabel was such a cosy talker. Get her alone and she’d tell anything to anybody—confidentially!
“Don’t be sore,” Arlene said. “He’s just a fellow I used to know when I was at the Gris——”
“Yes, I already heard that! Say, honest, do you mean you aren’t going to tell me his name? I know I’ve seen that good-looking sporty face of his somewhere before, and it kind of seems to me it was in the Sunday Rotogravure Section; I bet it’ll be there again and his name with it, too!”
“His name?” Arlene said promptly, upon that. “Gillespie Ives.”
“Pete’s sakes!” Mabel cried, enraptured. “Gillespie Ives! You mean to say you’ve known the great Gillespie Ives all this time and never——”
“Great?” Arlene laughed. “Where’d you get that ‘great’ stuff? He don’t count with me, hon; not a nickel’s worth.”
“Oh, he don’t? Say, listen! Why’s Gillespie Ives been at the Garfield Avenue Theater three times looking for you and what was it all about in the lobby just now? He certainly showed interest, hon!”
“Not in me,” Arlene said impatiently; but comprehended that Mabel must be told something and hoped that a part of the truth would satisfy her. “Listen, I’ll tell you, Mabe. It’s a laugh on him all right. One afternoon a couple weeks ago I was downtown shopping with a good-looking married girl-friend of mine and——”
“Who was she?”
“Who?” Arlene hesitated. “Why, she was a cousin of mine by marriage from out o’ town. Well, he passed us on the sidewalk in front of Marcy and Burton’s, and I noticed he’d turned around and was following us. He hasn’t got anything to do with his time, that bird, and it looks like he’s getting to be more and more of a chaser. He——”
“Pete’s sakes!” Mabel interrupted. “With a wife like Mrs. Gillespie Ives—anyhow judging from her pictures in the papers! He ought to be ashamed! Why, with a wife like that, if he’s around chasing everybody he sees on the street, he must have one of those manias you read about!”
“No. Too much money, I guess, and nothing to do, and he always did get that way over a whole lot of good looks on a girl.”
“Well, go on, Arlene. What happened?”
“Nothing at all. I had our Chev parked right by where we were and I saw he was fixing to speak to us; so I just poked her in ahead of me and jumped in, myself, and slid on down the street.”
“Well, go ahead. What then?”
“Nothing at all,” Arlene said again, and laughed. “That’s the whole business. First time he came to the Garfield Avenue Theater, last week, of course I knew what he was there for as soon as he commenced looking around. He thought maybe she’d be with me again and so he——”
“You’re skipping, Arlene.” Mabel was suspicious. “How’d he come to look for you at the Garfield Avenue if it’s straight you’ve never more’n said hello to him once or twice since you worked at the Griswold all that time ago?”
“Looked me up in the ’phone-book.”
“You mean he called you up?”
“Called me up?” Arlene laughed. “Men like that don’t call apartments where they’re liable to get a husband on the ’phone. No, he must have figured the Garfield Avenue was the nearest theater to where I lived; so he dropped in there, hoping she might be with me. I ducked out on him the first two times; but to-day he got me treed for a minute, and that’s all there is to it, Mabe.”
“All? Why, you haven’t——”
“Nuts over pretty women,” Arlene explained. “Tried to get me to tell him who she was and how to find her. I wouldn’t. That’s all the beans.”
“All?” Mabel was but the more suspicious. “Funny I never heard you mention any out o’ town cousin of yours by marriage before, Arlene.”
“That so? Might be a good many things I’ve never mentioned, don’t you expect so?”
“I certainly do!” Mabel said in bitter complaint. “I never knew anybody that kept more mysterious with their best friends. You never tell me anything. I bet you got a past that if poor Roy knew all about it the very hair on his head would——”
“That’ll do, Mabel!” Arlene spoke sharply, and this reference to her husband overspread her face with quick color; but, instantly realizing that her now deeply offended companion must again be placated, she said in a troubled voice, “Excuse me, Mabel; I didn’t mean it. You say I never tell you anything and maybe that’s so—I guess it’s kind of a habit.” She hesitated; but saw that it was necessary to continue her explanation. “Roy never wanted me to go on working at the Griswold after we were married and I wouldn’t of; but those days we just had to have the money. He hated my being there so much that afterwards—well, it’s something we just never talk about. You understand, don’t you? It’s like people that have been through a sickness or something they want to forget and so never mention.”
“You mean Roy can’t stand talking about it?” Mabel asked hungrily. “You mean he still gets sore on account of the sporty fellows that came in there and you——”
“I mean we don’t talk about it,” Arlene said. “What I don’t talk about with my husband I just as soon not talk about with anybody else, Mabel.”
“Oh, certainly,” Mabel returned, courteous in resentment. Then, pondering, she tried to think of something further with which to fret her tall companion. “Say listen, Arlene; s’pose this good-looking cousin of yours comes to find out some day Gillespie Ives was crazy over her and you choked him off, why, what about that? Aren’t you even going to tell her?”
“No, I’m not.”
“But listen here; he’s Gillespie Ives, and she might think you hadn’t done her much of a favor. I don’t say I expect she’d flop right into a date with him or anything; but when a man like that gets that way, why, I bet she’d certainly at least want to know it. S’pose she finds out——”
“Well, let her!” Arlene looked bored. “I’m not going to tell her.”
“But why not?”
“Gosh!” Arlene exclaimed. “She’s got a nice husband, and I don’t know her well enough to know what she’d do.”
“You don’t? I thought you said she’s your cousin.”
“By marriage,” Arlene said promptly, and yawned. “Listen, let’s quit talking about this, will you? There’s really nothing to it.”
“Okay.” Mabel’s assent was grudging; she felt that her curiosity had been treated as intrusive, something that happened too often when she was with Arlene. However, she postponed to a better occasion the reprisals natural under the circumstances, and the two friends walked on for almost a block, not talking.
They were nearing home; the yellow of the twilight was left only in the western sky, and the further distances of long, straight Garfield Avenue were obscured in gloom. A voluminous dirty smoke drooped down upon the street from the chimneys of smallish supposedly Spanish, Norman, Italian, Tudor, Georgian and Colonial houses and from the brick apartment buildings and from corner groceries, drug stores, delicatessen shops and shops that were semi-suburban branches of greater establishments downtown. Long ’buses and longer trolley-cars rolled by crowded with the thrifty who didn’t put themselves to the expense of “all day parking” downtown, and no doubt carrying also some too poor or too economical to support automobiles. But most of the evening home-coming folk who lived along these upper reaches of Garfield Avenue, three miles or more from the thriving city’s center, whizzed by in those ubiquitous vehicles, sedans.
The sedans strove with one another, stole marches on one another, quarreled, edged one another callously into peril, complained of one another and cursed one another. One, a complainer, having passed squawkily by Mrs. Finch and Mrs. Parker, was itself just afterward fiercely upbraided for halting unexpectedly at the curb before an apartment building; and, at the same moment, as if the outcries of the profane sedans heralded the brilliant spectacle, twin straight miles of street lights leaped instantaneously into white radiance.
“There’s Ed,” Mabel said, alluding to the owner of the abused sedan, as he crossed the sidewalk and entered the apartment house. “Of the whole bunch he’s the rottenest driver, easy! They think they got it all over the rest of us ever since they bought that new Pontie. I was going to ask him how Carrie’s cold is; but he’s gone in. I certainly hope she won’t come near me while she’s infectious. Listen, hon, when’s this new couple going to move in?”
Arlene had become absent-minded. “Who?”
“This couple that’s such friends of Roy’s—Foot, didn’t you say their name is? When they going to move in?”
“Oh, the Foots,” Arlene said. “Pretty soon, I guess. Roy’s only a friend of his; he’s never even seen her yet and I just barely know her, myself. He’s a real nice fellow, though, Ernest Foot.”
“Think they’ll do for the bunch, Arlene? Think we’ll want to take ’em in?”
“I don’t know,” Arlene said. “She’s awful good-looking. Look, there’s Ola.”
A thin, long-legged schoolgirl, roller-skating on the cement sidewalk, clattered toward the two young women. “He’s home,” the skater said to Arlene. “How about some eats?”
Mabel was glad this application didn’t concern her; she thought it nuisance enough to have to get supper for herself and Art. “Ain’t that a kid all over? Never stop making you do something for ’em from the day they’re born till they get married and give you the go-by for good. Not me!”
Ola, not removing her skates and preceding her mother and Mrs. Finch, clattered into the stone-faced entrance of the eight-storied brick apartment building. The vestibule, paved with black and white tiles, ended in two open glass doors with a glass transom above them, and the transom bore in neat gilt lettering the building’s title, “The Lorenzo”. The owner’s reticence in omitting to state what Lorenzo this namesake implied may have been either modest or uninformed, though certainly he wished to hint enticingly of magnificence. Nor was this wish of his ungratified by various tenants; young Mrs. Finch seldom entered the building without lifting a complacent glance to the name upon the transom.
“The Lorenzo,” she murmured now with pleasure. “I always like to have people notice me turning in here, don’t you, hon? Art says it may be a little old-fashioned, but it’s lots more dignified than those new ones up the Avenue. I expect even your Mr. Gillespie Ives’d think we’re at least a little somebody if he saw we lived here.” She lowered her voice to a suggestive, confidential tone. “You going to tell Roy about him, hon?”
“What!” Arlene was surprised and irritated. “I told you——”
“Oh, yes,” Mabel said quickly. “I forgot. On account you don’t like to talk about anything that dates back to your old days at the Griswold. I forgot.”
They passed between the glass doors and ascended four stone steps to a corridor, where Ola, still wearing her skates though seriously practising some tap-dancing steps, was awaiting them. Mabel was effusive over the long-legged little girl’s show of talent, and, for the time, made no more mention of Mr. Gillespie Ives. What she injuredly said to herself, however, was, “Thinks she put that over on me!”
III
Ola removed her skates in the elevator, which was operated by a young mulatto woman whose expression, recognizably habitual, was that of a person cogitating upon something superior but remote. Alternating the languid conveyance of news and audible plyings of chewing-gum, she informed Mrs. Parker and Mrs. Finch that their husbands had lately arrived. “Just carried Mr. Ed Stem up, too,” she added, during the ascent. “Ought to get a hair cut. Hasn’t had one since that last boil.”
“He say how Mrs. Stem’s cold is?” Mabel asked. “She been out to-day, Emma?”
“Not as I’ve saw,” Emma replied. “Heard her kachoo couple times when I been up to the eighth.”
She opened the grilled iron door of the floor she’d just mentioned; the passengers stepped into the corridor, and Emma, chewing with more vigor, descended in brilliance from their sight. Mabel turned to the left, and, laughingly calling, “Olive oil, gals!” to Arlene and Ola, who had gone to the right, she walked thoughtfully to a varnished, brown door at the upper end of the corridor. Between the two upper panels of this door, which was mate to all the other doors in sight, there was a calling-card held by a thumb-tack and engraved “Mr. and Mrs. Arthur I. Finch”, with “The Lorenzo” added near the left lower corner.
Mabel, being Mrs. Arthur I. Finch and at home, turned the octagonal brass knob of the door and entered a passage so slight in dimensions that five or six steps took her through its other doorway, where she was immediately in possession, so to speak, of almost the whole of her apartment. It was a room somewhat larger than the pinched hallway promised; the carpet was deep green, the ceiling was pale green, and the wallpaper, beginning as green at the white-painted baseboards, altered its tint talentedly at about the level of the eye and finished as increasingly radiant orange at the ceiling. White-painted double doors in one wall seemed to promise a spacious room beyond; but this was misleading, since a double bed now stood on its head, concealed behind these double doors. To the furniture, which was almost identical in all the apartments of the Lorenzo, Mr. and Mrs. Arthur I. Finch had added a few personal items of their own—a radio cabinet, a red-legged card-table with indigenous brass ash-trays, and two dangerous-looking one-legged “smokers’-stands”, one beside each of the two “double-stuffed” easy-chairs. The Finches also owned, of course, an article not at present in view—a sedan—and upon the sedan they had to pay taxes.
Clinking sounds and the smell of boiling coffee came through the open door of the kitchenette. Mabel called in that direction, “You there, hon?” Not awaiting a response, she continued, “That’s right; you just go ahead and set the nook table, Art. I’ll be back in a minute and do all the rest. Got something funny to tell you later if you’re a good boy.”
She returned to the corridor outside and began to walk toward its other end, passing varnished brown doors, carded like hers and all of them portals to ingeniously compacted dwelling-places inhabited, for the most part, by young or youngish couples not essentially differing from Mr. and Mrs. Arthur I. Finch. To Mrs. Finch’s mind, however, three of these doors were incomparably more interesting than the others, since on the other side of these three dwelt members of “the Lorenzo bunch”, that exclusive group centralized on this, the top floor of the Lorenzo.
The bunch preferred the top, feeling themselves there in more ways than one. They lived there, devoting their lives to the enjoyment and the intricate little inflictions of one another’s society; and, of all the various clusters of human beings piled up in the Lorenzo—struggling up or sinking down in the world, and pleasantly unconcerned with the world’s future or past, or with anything at a distance from themselves—the bunch lived in the most unrelaxed intimacy. They might indeed have been upon a little ship, passengers so deeply engaged with one another’s smallest affairs as to be unaware of the vessel’s destination.
Mrs. Finch pushed a pearly disk in a shallow socket beside a door that bore a card engraved “Mr. and Mrs. Charles C. Rice” and, of course, also “The Lorenzo”. A man’s voice called “Kmin”; she entered a hallway twin to her own and an apartment almost as close kin to hers. An addition to young Mr. and Mrs. Rice’s furniture, however, instantly caught Mrs. Finch’s eye.
“Well, if you aren’t the nervy little copy-cats!” she cried. She first addressed the visible occupant of the apartment, a red-haired young man seemingly more interested in his evening newspaper than in her; then she called more loudly toward the open door of the kitchenette, “Say listen, Lide! Where’d you get the front to imitate I and Art and buy you these brass-and-mahogany smoking-stands?”
