“This stupid story about Joe Drummond—I’m not saying I’ll never marry him, but I’m certainly not engaged. Now and then, when you are taking your evening walks, if you would ask me to walk with you—”
K. looked rather dazed.
“I can’t imagine anything pleasanter; but I wish you’d explain just how—”
Sidney smiled at him. As he stood on the lowest step, their eyes were almost level.
“If I walk with you, they’ll know I’m not engaged to Joe,” she said, with engaging directness.
The house was quiet. He waited in the lower hall until she had reached the top of the staircase. For some curious reason, in the time to come, that was the way Sidney always remembered K. Le Moyne—standing in the little hall, one hand upstretched to shut off the gas overhead, and his eyes on hers above.
“Good-night,” said K. Le Moyne. And all the things he had put out of his life were in his voice.
CHAPTER IV
On the morning after Sidney had invited K. Le Moyne to take her to walk, Max Wilson came down to breakfast rather late. Dr. Ed had breakfasted an hour before, and had already attended, with much profanity on the part of the patient, to a boil on the back of Mr. Rosenfeld’s neck.
“Better change your laundry,” cheerfully advised Dr. Ed, cutting a strip of adhesive plaster. “Your neck’s irritated from your white collars.”
Rosenfeld eyed him suspiciously, but, possessing a sense of humor also, he grinned.
“It ain’t my everyday things that bother me,” he replied. “It’s my blankety-blank dress suit. But if a man wants to be tony—”
“Tony” was not of the Street, but of its environs. Harriet was “tony” because she walked with her elbows in and her head up. Dr. Max was “tony” because he breakfasted late, and had a man come once a week and take away his clothes to be pressed. He was “tony,” too, because he had brought back from Europe narrow-shouldered English- cut clothes, when the Street was still padding its shoulders. Even K. would have been classed with these others, for the stick that he carried on his walks, for the fact that his shabby gray coat was as unmistakably foreign in cut as Dr. Max’s, had the neighborhood so much as known him by sight. But K., so far, had remained in humble obscurity, and, outside of Mrs. McKee’s, was known only as the Pages’ roomer.
Mr. Rosenfeld buttoned up the blue flannel shirt which, with a pair of Dr. Ed’s cast-off trousers, was his only wear; and fished in his pocket.
“How much, Doc?”
“Two dollars,” said Dr. Ed briskly.
“Holy cats! For one jab of a knife! My old woman works a day and a half for two dollars.”
“I guess it’s worth two dollars to you to be able to sleep on your back.” He was imperturbably straightening his small glass table. He knew Rosenfeld. “If you don’t like my price, I’ll lend you the knife the next time, and you can let your wife attend to you.”
Rosenfeld drew out a silver dollar, and followed it reluctantly with a limp and dejected dollar bill.
“There are times,” he said, “when, if you’d put me and the missus and a knife in the same room, you wouldn’t have much left but the knife.”
Dr. Ed waited until he had made his stiff-necked exit. Then he took the two dollars, and, putting the money into an envelope, indorsed it in his illegible hand. He heard his brother’s step on the stairs, and Dr. Ed made haste to put away the last vestiges of his little operation.
Ed’s lapses from surgical cleanliness were a sore trial to the younger man, fresh from the clinics of Europe. In his downtown office, to which he would presently make his leisurely progress, he wore a white coat, and sterilized things of which Dr. Ed did not even know the names.
So, as he came down the stairs, Dr. Ed, who had wiped his tiny knife with a bit of cotton,—he hated sterilizing it; it spoiled the edge,—thrust it hastily into his pocket. He had cut boils without boiling anything for a good many years, and no trouble. But he was wise with the wisdom of the serpent and the general practitioner, and there was no use raising a discussion.
Max’s morning mood was always a cheerful one. Now and then the way of the transgressor is disgustingly pleasant. Max, who sat up until all hours of the night, drinking beer or whiskey-and-soda, and playing bridge, wakened to a clean tongue and a tendency to have a cigarette between shoes, so to speak. Ed, whose wildest dissipation had perhaps been to bring into the world one of the neighborhood’s babies, wakened customarily to the dark hour of his day, when he dubbed himself failure and loathed the Street with a deadly loathing.
So now Max brought his handsome self down the staircase and paused at the office door.
“At it, already,” he said. “Or have you been to bed?”
“It’s after nine,” protested Ed mildly. “If I don’t start early, I never get through.”
Max yawned.
“Better come with me,” he said. “If things go on as they’ve been doing, I’ll have to have an assistant. I’d rather have you than anybody, of course.” He put his lithe surgeon’s hand on his brother’s shoulder. “Where would I be if it hadn’t been for you? All the fellows know what you’ve done.”
In spite of himself, Ed winced. It was one thing to work hard that there might be one success instead of two half successes. It was a different thing to advertise one’s mediocrity to the world. His sphere of the Street and the neighborhood was his own. To give it all up and become his younger brother’s assistant—even if it meant, as it would, better hours and more money—would be to submerge his identity. He could not bring himself to it.
“I guess I’ll stay where I am,” he said. “They know me around here, and I know them. By the way, will you leave this envelope at Mrs. McKee’s? Maggie Rosenfeld is ironing there to-day. It’s for her.”
Max took the envelope absently.
“You’ll go on here to the end of your days, working for a pittance,” he objected. “Inside of ten years there’ll be
