“Wait until fall, if you’re thinking of
it,” K. advised. “This is tepid
compared with what you’ll get down there.”
“I’ve got to get away from here.”
K. nodded understandingly. Since the scene at
the White Springs Hotel, both knew that no explanation
was necessary.
“It isn’t so much that I mind her turning
me down,” Joe said, after a silence. “A
girl can’t marry all the men who want her.
But I don’t like this hospital idea.
I don’t understand it. She didn’t
have to go. Sometimes”—he turned
bloodshot eyes on Le Moyne—“I think
she went because she was crazy about somebody there.”
“She went because she wanted to be useful.”
“She could be useful at home.”
For almost twenty minutes they tramped on without
speech. They had made a circle, and the lights
of the city were close again. K. stopped and put
a kindly hand on Joe’s shoulder.
“A man’s got to stand up under a thing
like this, you know. I mean, it mustn’t
be a knockout. Keeping busy is a darned good
method.”
Joe shook himself free, but without resentment.
“I’ll tell you what’s eating me
up,” he exploded. “It’s Max
Wilson. Don’t talk to me about her going
to the hospital to be useful. She’s crazy
about him, and he’s as crooked as a dog’s
hind leg.”
“Perhaps. But it’s always up to
the girl. You know that.”
He felt immeasurably old beside Joe’s boyish
blustering—old and rather helpless.
“I’m watching him. Some of these
days I’ll get something on him. Then she’ll
know what to think of her hero!”
“That’s not quite square, is it?”
“He’s not square.”
Joe had left him then, wheeling abruptly off into
the shadows. K. had gone home alone, rather uneasy.
There seemed to be mischief in the very air.
Tillie was gone.
Oddly enough, the last person to see her before she
left was Harriet Kennedy. On the third day after
Mr. Schwitter’s visit, Harriet’s colored
maid had announced a visitor.
Harriet’s business instinct had been good.
She had taken expensive rooms in a good location,
and furnished them with the assistance of a decor store.
Then she arranged with a New York house to sell her
models on commission.
Her short excursion to New York had marked for Harriet
the beginning of a new heaven and a new earth.
Here, at last, she found people speaking her own
language. She ventured a suggestion to a manufacturer,
and found it greeted, not, after the manner of the
Street, with scorn, but with approval and some surprise.
“About once in ten years,” said Mr. Arthurs,
“we have a woman from out of town bring us a
suggestion that is both novel and practical.
When we find people like that, we watch them.
They climb, madame,—climb.”
Harriet’s climbing was not so rapid as to make
her dizzy; but business was coming. The first
time she made a price of seventy-five dollars for an
evening gown, she went out immediately after and took
a drink of water. Her throat was parched.
