DOUBLE IDENTITY By Charles F. Myers - https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/65282/pg65282-images.html

 

"Coffee?" Fleetwood said. He seized upon the word as a drowning man might snatch at a drifting life preserver. Besides, it dinged a small bell of recognition somewhere in the back of his mind. "Yes," he murmured, "coffee, please."

"Okay, then," the girl said, and left.

Fleetwood reflected on this exchange in a thickening mood of perturbation. Retracing, haltingly, its tangled bypaths, it seemed to lack in retrospect those bright glimmerings of reason that one looks for in a friendly conversation. The end result appeared to be that he was merely about to receive coffee, which his confused faculties identified only as something murky and brown, of undetermined usefulness. He had hoped for more. As he thought on it, however, voices reached to his inner ear. The girls at the magazine racks had tuned up conversationally. Chit-chat was their medium, of the sort that, for all its lack of substance, takes on a certain penetration after a time. In the end, Fleetwood found himself slipping, no matter how unwillingly, into the role of the eavesdropper. As it was, though, he couldn't have selected a more illuminating moment in which to fall from grace.

 

Dermitt moved back to the chair and executed another collapse. It is not likely that the stock crash of '29 could have produced a more vivid picture of the Ruined Man. His arms hung slack at his sides.

"No wonder the story's been going so badly lately," he groaned. "No wonder you haven't been consistent in print." He looked up slowly. "What are you going to do?"

"Nothing special," Fleetwood said. "Live a little, I suppose. I haven't made any definite plans yet. Maybe I'll just do something quiet, like raising flowers."

 

"Obviously your readers are from an extremely low level of civilized society. I'm surprised that a bunch of savage, sadistic-minded brutes like that know how to read."

"It's no good resorting to insults," Dermitt said mildly. "In fact, you had better mind your manners or this Kitty of yours is going to get the surprise of her pallid little life.