All things come to him who, sedulously acting the orchid's part,
vegetates and bides his time. To me in the passage of days came Anne
Leffingwell, to talk of many things, the conversation invariably
touching at some point upon Mr. Martin Dyke--and lingering there. She
was solicitous, not to say skeptical, regarding Mr. Dyke's reason. Came
also Martin Dyke to converse intelligently upon labor, free verse,
ouija, the football outlook, O. Henry, Crucible Steel, and Mr.
Leffingwell. He was both solicitous and skeptical regarding Mr.
Leffingwell's existence. Now when two young persons come separately to
an old person to discuss each other's affairs, it is a bad sign. Or
perhaps a good sign. Just as you choose.

Adopting the Mordaunt Estate's sardonic suggestion, Martin Dyke had
settled down to van life in a private alleyway next to Number 37. Anne
Leffingwell deemed this criminally extravagant since the rental of a van
must be prodigious. ("Tell her not to worry; my family own the storage
and moving plant," was one of his many messages that I neglected to
deliver.) On his part he worried over the loneliness and simplicity of
her establishment--one small but neat maid--which he deemed incongruous
with her general effect of luxury and ease of life, and wondered whether
she had split with her family. (She hadn't; "I've always been brought up
like a--a--an artichoke," she confided to me. "So when father went West
for six months, I just moved, and I'm going to be a potato and see how I
like it. Besides, I've got some research work to do.")

Every morning a taxi called and took her to an uptown library, and every
afternoon she came back to the harlequin-fronted house at Number 37.
Dyke's hours were such that he saw her only when she returned early, for
he slept by day in his van, and worked most of the night on electrical
experiments which he was conducting over on the river front, and which