Skyscraper Read Online Free PDF

amiably.
    Off Fifth Avenue, the little place. Up a flight of brownstone steps. Small tables, dim light, a radio, a fat proprietor in a morning coat. “Haven’t seen you for a long time, Mr. Shepard.”
    â€œCocktail? They’re very good,” promised Tom. “Right off the boat. Fishing smack, Staten Island ferryboat, passage to Welfare Island. Who knows?”
    When the small frosted glasses came, Tom raised his and looked at her over the rim. “Here’s mud in your eye,” he said sentimentally, “and now I’ll let Mike there order, it’s less trouble. You like veal, don’t you? Well, if you don’t, you’ll learn. Broccoli? I thought so. And some of that fluffy stuff in glasses, with a kick in it. And coffee. Large, I hope.” He regarded her anxiously. “Don’t say you’re a demitasse girl,” he implored her. “Be bourgeois like me!”
    She confessed to a liking for large coffee with, no less, hot milk and cream. “Swell,” said her host in great contentment. “Now that’s done. Tell me all about yourself, so I can reciprocate. I promise to curb my impatience while you spin your yarn. Then I’ll tell one.”
    â€œThere isn’t much,” she told him, laughing, and spoke brieflyof home and her people, of her boredom at the university, of her sense that she was wasting time. And of her arrival in New York, Sarah Dennet’s protégée.
    â€œDo you live with her?” Tom asked, attacking the antipasto.
    â€œNo.” Lynn pushed a spineless red rim of something about on her plate and eventually ate it, abstractedly. “No, I live in a business club for girls.”
    â€œSounds God-awful,” commented Tom. “Hen house or chicken coop?”
    â€œChicken coop, I fancy. They throw you out when you’re thirty.”
    Tom was silent, visualizing thousands of women of thirty hurtling down the steps of the club, fleeing homeless into the night. “Hard luck,” he said, “but you have about fifteen years to go, haven’t you?”
    She replied primly, “I’m twenty-two.”
    â€œI’m twenty-three,” said Tom in a superior manner.
    They viewed each other across the table. Forty-five years between them. The waiter removed the antipasto and brought on the minestrone. “It looks like such a lot!” said Lynn, regarding it with some trepidation.
    â€œElegant soup,” praised Tom. “Times when I’m broke I order me minestrone, and it stays by me all day. Spaghetti is a snare and a delusion. You eat it until it comes out of your ears, but three hours later you could devour the side of a barn. Minestrone sticks. Probably glue in it,” he suggested helpfully.
    He wanted to know all about the club. She told him—sketchily. Yes, they had meals there, breakfast, cafeteria style, and dinner. Dinner was chicken Sundays and hashed chicken Mondays, and lamb on Tuesdays and lamb hash on Wednesdays.
    â€œDon’t tell me any more,” begged Tom, “you poor kid!”
    But she went on, laughing a little, “We’ve a radio. And a phonograph. We have to be in at eleven-thirty or do a lot of expert explaining. We’ve a parlor where we can receive gentlemen visitors.” She looked at him, her head a little on one side, gray eyes shining through the black lashes. “The visitors have to meet the directress, and there’s an awful rush to see who getsthe couch in the corner if more than one girl is entertaining. It’s great fun,” she added, remembering young Mr. Wilkins and one or two others.
    Tom called upon his maker. He said, sighing, “Well, we’ll spend our time at the movies then. Do you skate? That’s nice of you. We’ll skate. Bus ride. Now and then we’ll see a good show. Oh,” mourned Tom gustily, “oh, for the good old days when every girl had a back parlor for her personal use, and