hard piece of work. She is damned beautiful, actually. I wonder what it would have been like if I had ever had the money to buy me that kind and put them into the mink? I’ll settle for what I have, he thought, and they can go and hang themselves.
The bar-tender shook hands with him. This bar-tender was an Anarchist but he did not mind the Colonel being a Colonel at all. He was delighted by it and proud and loving about it as though the Anarchists had a Colonel, too, and in some ways, in the several months that they had known each other, he seemed to feel that he had invented, or at least, erected the Colonel as you might be happy about participating in the erection of a campanile, or even the old church at Torcello.
The bar-tender had heard the conversation, or, rather, the flat statement at the table and he was very happy.
He had already sent down, via the dumb-waiter, for a Gordon’s gin and Campari and he said, “It is coming up in that hand-pulled device. How does everything go at Trieste?”
“About as you would imagine.”
“I couldn’t even imagine.”
“Then don’t strain,” the Colonel said, “and you will never get piles.”
“I wouldn’t mind it if I was a Colonel.”
“I never mind it.”
“You’d be over-run like a dose of salts,” the waiter said.
“Don’t tell the Honorable Pacciardi,” the Colonel said.
He and the bar-tender had a joke about this because the
