“I was sad to-night,” she said plaintively.  “I wished to jump out the window.”

Byrne was startled, but the girl was smiling at the recollection.

“And I made you feel like that?”

“Not you—­the other Fraulein.  I was dirt to her.  I—­” She stopped tragically, then sniffled.

“The sausages!” she cried, and gathering up her skirts ran toward the kitchen.  Byrne went on into the sitting-room.

Stewart was a single man spending two years in post-graduate work in Germany and Austria, not so much because the Germans and Austrians could teach what could not be taught at home, but because of the wealth of clinical material.  The great European hospitals, filled to overflowing, offered unlimited choice of cases.  The contempt for human life of overpopulated cities, coupled with the extreme poverty and helplessness of the masses, combined to form that tragic part of the world which dies that others may live.

Stewart, like Byrne, was doing surgery, and the very lack of fineness which Byrne felt in the man promised something in his work, a sort of ruthlessness, a singleness of purpose, good or bad, an overwhelming egotism that in his profession might only be a necessary self-reliance.

His singleness of purpose had, at the beginning of his residence in Vienna, devoted itself to making him comfortable.  With the narrow means at his control he had the choice of two alternatives:  To live, as Byrne was living, in a third-class pension, stewing in summer, freezing in winter, starving always; or the alternative he had chosen.

The Stewart apartment had only three rooms, but it possessed that luxury of luxuries, a bath.  It was not a bath in the usual sense of water on tap, and shining nickel plate, but a bath for all that, where with premeditation and forethought one might bathe.  The room had once been a fuel and store room, but now boasted a tin tub and a stove with a reservoir on top, where water might be heated to the boiling point, at the same time bringing up the atmosphere to a point where the tin tub sizzled if one touched it.

Behind the bathroom a tiny kitchen with a brick stove; next, a bedroom; the whole incredibly neat.  Along one side of the wall a clothespress, which the combined wardrobes of two did not fill.  And beyond that again, opening through an arch with a dingy chenille curtain, the sitting-room, now in chaotic disorder.

Byrne went directly to the sitting-room.  There were four men already there:  Stewart and Boyer, a pathology man named Wallace Hunter, doing research work at the general hospital, and a young piano student from Tennessee named MacLean.  The cards had been already dealt, and Byrne stood by waiting for the hand to be played.

The game was a small one, as befitted the means of the majority.  It was a regular Saturday night affair, as much a custom as the beer that sat in Steins on the floor beside each man, or as Marie’s boiled Wiener sausages.