Page:Manhattan Transfer (John Dos Passos, 1925).djvu/390

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Manhattan Transfer

"Oh hell I'll cash a check; the account's in both our names."

"They'll cash it for me at the Biltmore, they know me there. When we get to Canada everything will be quite all right I can assure you. In His Majesty's Dominion, the name of Buckminster has rather more weight than in the U.S."

"Oh I know darling, it's nothing but money in New York."

When they were walking up Fifth Avenue she hooked her arm in his suddenly. "O Buck I have the most horrible thing to tell you. It made me deathly ill. . . . You know what I told you about the awful smell we had in the apartment we thought was rats? This morning I met the woman who lives on the ground floor. . . . O it makes me sick to think of it. Her face was green as that bus. . . . It seems they've been having the plumbing examined by an inspector. . . . They arrested the woman upstairs. O it's too disgusting. I cant tell you about it. . . . I'll never go back there. I'd die if I did. . . . There wasnt a drop of water in the house all day yesterday."

"What was the matter?"

"It's too horrible."

"Tell it to popper."

"Buck they wont know you when you get back home to Orpen Manor."

"But what was it?"

"There was a woman upstairs who did illegal operations, abortions. . . . That was what stopped up the plumbing."

"Good God."

"Somehow that's the last straw. . . . And Roy sitting limp over his damn paper in the middle of that stench with that horrible adenoid expression on his face."

"Poor little girl."

"But Buck I couldn't cash a check for more than two hundred. . . . It'll be an overdraft as it is. Will that get us to Calgary?"

"Not very comfortably. . . . There's a man I know in Montreal who'll give me a job writing society notes. . . .