But midnight found others awake. It found Nina,
for instance, in her draped French bed, consulting
her jeweled watch and listening for Leslie’s
return from the country club. An angry and rather
heart-sick Nina. And it found the night editor
of one of the morning papers drinking a cup of coffee
that a boy had brought in, and running through a mass
of copy on his desk. He picked up several sheets
of paper, with a photograph clamped to them, and ran
through them quickly. A man in a soft hat, sitting
on the desk, watched him idly.
“Beverly Carlysle,” commented the night
editor. “Back with bells on!” He
took up the photograph. “Doesn’t
look much older, does she? It’s a queer
world.”
Louis Bassett, star reporter and feature writer of
the Times-Republican, smiled reminiscently.
“She was a wonder,” he said. “I
interviewed her once, and I was crazy about her.
She had the stage set for me, all right. The
papers had been full of the incident of Jud Clark and
the night he lined up fifteen Johnnies in the lobby,
each with a bouquet as big as a tub, all of them in
top hats and Inverness coats, and standing in a row.
So she played up the heavy domestic for me; knitting
or sewing, I forget.”
“Fell for her, did you?”
“Did I? That was ten years ago, and I’m
not sure I’m over it yet.”
“Probably that’s the reason,” said
the city editor, drily. “Go and see her,
and get over it. Get her views on the flapper
and bobbed hair, for next Sunday. Smith would
be crazy about it.”
He finished his coffee.
“You might ask, too, what she thinks has become
of Judson Clark,” he added. “I have
an idea she knows, if any one does.” Bassett
stared at him.
“You’re joking, aren’t you?”
“Yes. But it would make a darned good
story.”
When he finished medical college Dick Livingstone
had found, like other men, that the two paths of
ambition and duty were parallel and did not meet.
Along one lay his desire to focus all his energy
in one direction, to follow disease into the laboratory
instead of the sick room, and there to fight its unsung
battles. And win. He felt that he would
win.
Along the other lay David.
It was not until he had completed his course and had
come home that he had realized that David was growing
old. Even then he might have felt that, by the
time David was compelled to relinquish his hold on
his practice, he himself would be sufficiently established
in his specialty to take over the support of the household.
But here there was interposed a new element, one
he had not counted on. David was fiercely jealous
of his practice; the thought that it might pass into
new and alien hands was bitter to him. To hand
it down to his adopted son was one thing; to pass
it over to “some young whipper-snapper”
was another.
