K. Le Moyne had wakened early that first morning in his new quarters. When he sat up and yawned, it was to see his worn cravat disappearing with vigorous tugs under the bureau. He rescued it, gently but firmly.
“You and I, Reginald,” he apostrophized the bureau, “will have to come to an understanding. What I leave on the floor you may have, but what blows down is not to be touched.”
Because he was young and very strong, he wakened to a certain lightness of spirit. The morning sun had always called him to a new day, and the sun was shining. But he grew depressed as he prepared for the office. He told himself savagely, as he put on his shabby clothing, that, having sought for peace and now found it, he was an ass for resenting it. The trouble was, of course, that he came of fighting stock: soldiers and explorers, even a gentleman adventurer or two, had been his forefather. He loathed peace with a deadly loathing.
Having given up everything else, K. Le Moyne had also given up the love of woman. That, of course, is figurative. He had been too busy for women; and now he was too idle. A small part of his brain added figures in the office of a gas company daily, for the sum of two dollars and fifty cents per eight-hour working day. But the real K. Le Moyne that had dreamed dreams, had nothing to do with the figures, but sat somewhere in his head and mocked him as he worked at his task.
“Time's going by, and here you are!” mocked the real person—who was, of course, not K. Le Moyne at all. “You're the hell of a lot of use, aren't you? Two and two are four and three are seven—take off the discount. That's right. It's a man's work, isn't it?”
“Somebody's got to do this sort of thing,” protested the small part of his brain that earned the two-fifty per working day. “And it's a great anaesthetic. He can't think when he's doing it. There's something practical about figures, and—rational.”
He dressed quickly, ascertaining that he had enough money to buy a five-dollar ticket at Mrs. McKee's; and, having given up the love of woman with other things, he was careful not to look about for Sidney on his way.
He breakfasted at Mrs. McKee's, and was initiated into the mystery of the ticket punch. The food was rather good, certainly plentiful; and even his squeamish morning appetite could find no fault with the self-respecting tidiness of the place. Tillie proved to be neat and austere. He fancied it would not be pleasant to be very late for one's meals—in fact, Sidney had hinted as much. Some of the “mealers”—the Street's name for them—ventured on various small familiarities of speech with Tillie. K. Le Moyne himself was scrupulously polite, but reserved. He was determined not to let the Street encroach on his wretchedness. Because he had come to live there was no reason why it should adopt him. But he was very polite. When the deaf-and-dumb book agent wrote something on a pencil pad and pushed it toward him, he replied in kind.
“We are very glad to welcome you to the McKee family,” was what was written on the pad.
“Very happy, indeed, to be with you,” wrote back Le Moyne—and realized with a sort of shock that he meant it.
The kindly greeting had touched him. The greeting and the breakfast cheered him; also, he had evidently made some headway with Tillie.
“Don't you want a toothpick?” she asked, as he went out.
In K.'s previous walk of life there had been no toothpicks; or, if there were any, they were kept, along with the family scandals, in a closet. But nearly a year of buffeting about had taught him many things. He took one, and placed it nonchalantly in his waistcoat pocket, as he had seen the others do.
Tillie, her rush hour over, wandered back into the kitchen and poured herself a cup of coffee. Mrs. McKee was reweighing the meat order.
“Kind of a nice fellow,” Tillie said, cup to lips—“the new man.”
“Week or meal?”
“Week. He'd be handsome if he wasn't so grouchy-looking. Lit up some when Mr. Wagner sent him one of his love letters. Rooms over at the Pages'.”
Mrs. McKee drew a long breath and entered the lamb stew in a book.
“When I think of Anna Page taking a roomer, it just about knocks me over, Tillie. And where they'll put him, in that little house—he looked thin, what I saw of him. Seven pounds and a quarter.” This last referred, not to K. Le Moyne, of course, but to the lamb stew.
“Thin as a fiddle-string.”
“Just keep an eye on him, that he gets enough.” Then, rather ashamed of her unbusinesslike methods: “A thin mealer's a poor advertisement. Do you suppose this is the dog meat or the soup scraps?”
Tillie was a niece of Mrs. Rosenfeld. In such manner was most of the Street and its environs connected; in such wise did its small gossip start at one end and pursue its course down one side and up the other.
“Sidney Page is engaged to Joe Drummond,” announced Tillie. “He sent her a lot of pink roses yesterday.”
There was no malice in her flat statement, no envy. Sidney and she, living in the world of the Street, occupied different spheres. But the very lifelessness in her voice told how remotely such things touched her, and thus was tragic. “Mealers” came and went—small clerks, petty tradesmen, husbands living alone in darkened houses during the summer hegira of wives. Various and catholic was Tillie's male acquaintance, but compounded of good fellowship only. Once, years before, romance had paraded itself before her in the garb of a traveling nurseryman—had walked by and not come back.
“And Miss Harriet's going into business for herself. She's taken rooms downtown; she's going to be Madame Something or other.”
Now, at last, was Mrs. McKee's attention caught riveted.
“For the love of mercy! At her age! It's downright selfish. If she raises her prices she can't make my new foulard.”
Tillie sat at the table, her faded blue eyes fixed on the back yard, where her aunt, Mrs. Rosenfeld, was hanging out the week's wash of table linen.
“I don't know as it's so selfish,” she reflected. “We've only got one life. I guess a body's got the right to live it.”
Mrs. McKee eyed her suspiciously, but Tillie's face showed no emotion.
“You don't ever hear of Schwitter, do you?”
“No; I guess she's still living.”
Schwitter, the nurseryman, had proved to have a wife in an insane asylum. That was why Tillie's romance had only paraded itself before her and had gone by.
“You got out of that lucky.”
Tillie rose and tied a gingham apron over her white one.
“I guess so. Only sometimes—”
“I don't know as it would have been so wrong. He ain't young, and I ain't. And we're not getting any younger. He had nice manners; he'd have been good to me.”
Mrs. McKee's voice failed her. For a moment she gasped like a fish. Then:
“And him a married man!”
“Well, I'm not going to do it,” Tillie soothed her. “I get to thinking about it sometimes; that's all. This new fellow made me think of him. He's got the same nice way about him.”
Aye, the new man had made her think of him, and June, and the lovers who lounged along the Street in the moonlit avenues toward the park and love; even Sidney's pink roses. Change was in the very air of the Street that June morning. It was in Tillie, making a last clutch at youth, and finding, in this pale flare of dying passion, courage to remember what she had schooled herself to forget; in Harriet asserting her right to live her life; in Sidney, planning with eager eyes a life of service which did not include Joe; in K. Le Moyne, who had built up a wall between himself and the world, and was seeing it demolished by a deaf-and-dumb book agent whose weapon was a pencil pad!
And yet, for a week nothing happened: Joe came in the evenings and sat on the steps with Sidney, his honest heart, in his eyes. She could not bring herself at first to tell him about the hospital. She put it off from day to day. Anna, no longer sulky, accepted with the childlike faith Sidney's statement that “they'd get along; she had a splendid scheme,” and took to helping Harriet in her preparations for leaving. Tillie, afraid of her rebellious spirit, went to prayer meeting. And K. Le Moyne, finding his little room hot in the evenings and not wishing to intrude on the two on the doorstep, took to reading his paper in the park, and after twilight to long, rapid walks out into the country. The walks satisfied the craving of his active body for exercise, and tired him so he could sleep. On one such occasion he met Mr. Wagner, and they carried on an animated conversation until it was too dark to see the pad. Even then, it developed that Wagner could write in the dark; and he secured the last word in a long argument by doing this and striking a match for K. to read by.
When K. was sure that the boy had gone, he would turn back toward the Street. Some of the heaviness of his spirit always left him at sight of the little house. Its kindly atmosphere seemed to reach out and envelop him. Within was order and quiet, the fresh-down bed, the tidiness of his ordered garments. There was even affection—Reginald, waiting on the fender for his supper, and regarding him with wary and bright-eyed friendliness.
Life, that had seemed so simple, had grown very complicated for Sidney. There was her mother to break the news to, and Joe. Harriet would approve, she felt; but these others! To assure Anna that she must manage alone for three years, in order to be happy and comfortable afterward—that was hard enough to tell Joe she was planning a future without him, to destroy the light in his blue eyes—that hurt.
After all, Sidney told K. first. One Friday evening, coming home late, as usual, he found her on the doorstep, and Joe gone. She moved over hospitably. The moon had waxed and waned, and the Street was dark. Even the ailanthus blossoms had ceased their snow-like dropping. The colored man who drove Dr. Ed in the old buggy on his daily rounds had brought out the hose and sprinkled the street. Within this zone of freshness, of wet asphalt and dripping gutters, Sidney sat, cool and silent.
“Please sit down. It is cool now. My idea of luxury is to have the Street sprinkled on a hot night.”
K. disposed of his long legs on the steps. He was trying to fit his own ideas of luxury to a garden hose and a city street.
“I'm afraid you're working too hard.”
“I? I do a minimum of labor for a minimum of wage.
“But you work at night, don't you?”
K. was natively honest. He hesitated. Then:
“No, Miss Page.”
“But You go out every evening!” Suddenly the truth burst on her.
“Oh, dear!” she said. “I do believe—why, how silly of you!”
K. was most uncomfortable.
“Really, I like it,” he protested. “I hang over a desk all day, and in the evening I want to walk. I ramble around the park and see lovers on benches—it's rather thrilling. They sit on the same benches evening after evening. I know a lot of them by sight, and if they're not there I wonder if they have quarreled, or if they have finally got married and ended the romance. You can see how exciting it is.”
Quite suddenly Sidney laughed.
“How very nice you are!” she said—“and how absurd! Why should their getting married end the romance? And don't you know that, if you insist on walking the streets and parks at night because Joe Drummond is here, I shall have to tell him not to come?”
This did not follow, to K.'s mind. They had rather a heated argument over it, and became much better acquainted.
“If I were engaged to him,” Sidney ended, her cheeks very pink, “I—I might understand. But, as I am not—”
“Ah!” said K., a trifle unsteadily. “So you are not?”
Only a week—and love was one of the things she had had to give up, with others. Not, of course, that he was in love with Sidney then. But he had been desperately lonely, and, for all her practical clearheadedness, she was softly and appealingly feminine. By way of keeping his head, he talked suddenly and earnestly of Mrs. McKee, and food, and Tillie, and of Mr. Wagner and the pencil pad.
“It's like a game,” he said. “We disagree on everything, especially Mexico. If you ever tried to spell those Mexican names—”
“Why did you think I was engaged?” she insisted.
Now, in K.'s walk of life—that walk of life where there are no toothpicks, and no one would have believed that twenty-one meals could have been secured for five dollars with a ticket punch thrown in—young girls did not receive the attention of one young man to the exclusion of others unless they were engaged. But he could hardly say that.
“Oh, I don't know. Those things get in the air. I am quite certain, for instance, that Reginald suspects it.”
“It's Johnny Rosenfeld,” said Sidney, with decision. “It's horrible, the way things get about. Because Joe sent me a box of roses—As a matter of fact, I'm not engaged, or going to be, Mr. Le Moyne. I'm going into a hospital to be a nurse.”
Le Moyne said nothing. For just a moment he closed his eyes. A man is in a rather a bad way when, every time he closes his eyes, he sees the same thing, especially if it is rather terrible. When it gets to a point where he lies awake at night and reads, for fear of closing them—
“You're too young, aren't you?”
“Dr. Ed—one of the Wilsons across the Street—is going to help me about that. His brother Max is a big surgeon there. I expect you've heard of him. We're very proud of him in the Street.”
Lucky for K. Le Moyne that the moon no longer shone on the low gray doorstep, that Sidney's mind had traveled far away to shining floors and rows of white beds. “Life—in the raw,” Dr. Ed had said that other afternoon. Closer to her than the hospital was life in the raw that night.
So, even here, on this quiet street in this distant city, there was to be no peace. Max Wilson just across the way! It—it was ironic. Was there no place where a man could lose himself? He would have to move on again, of course.
But that, it seemed, was just what he could not do. For:
“I want to ask you to do something, and I hope you'll be quite frank,” said Sidney.
“Anything that I can do—”
“It's this. If you are comfortable, and—and like the room and all that, I wish you'd stay.” She hurried on: “If I could feel that mother had a dependable person like you in the house, it would all be easier.”
Dependable! That stung.
“But—forgive my asking; I'm really interested—can your mother manage? You'll get practically no money during your training.”
“I've thought of that. A friend of mine, Christine Lorenz, is going to be married. Her people are wealthy, but she'll have nothing but what Palmer makes. She'd like to have the parlor and the sitting room behind. They wouldn't interfere with you at all,” she added hastily. “Christine's father would build a little balcony at the side for them, a sort of porch, and they'd sit there in the evenings.”
Behind Sidney's carefully practical tone the man read appeal. Never before had he realized how narrow the girl's world had been. The Street, with but one dimension, bounded it! In her perplexity, she was appealing to him who was practically a stranger.
And he knew then that he must do the thing she asked. He, who had fled so long, could roam no more. Here on the Street, with its menace just across, he must live, that she might work. In his world, men had worked that women might live in certain places, certain ways. This girl was going out to earn her living, and he would stay to make it possible. But no hint of all this was in his voice.
“I shall stay, of course,” he said gravely. “I—this is the nearest thing to home that I've known for a long time. I want you to know that.”
So they moved their puppets about, Anna and Harriet, Christine and her husband-to-be, Dr. Ed, even Tillie and the Rosenfelds; shifted and placed them, and, planning, obeyed inevitable law.
“Christine shall come, then,” said Sidney forsooth, “and we will throw out a balcony.”
So they planned, calmly ignorant that poor Christine's story and Tillie's and Johnny Rosenfeld's and all the others' were already written among the things that are, and the things that shall be hereafter.
“You are very good to me,” said Sidney.
When she rose, K. Le Moyne sprang to his feet.
Anna had noticed that he always rose when she entered his room,—with fresh towels on Katie's day out, for instance,—and she liked him for it. Years ago, the men she had known had shown this courtesy to their women; but the Street regarded such things as affectation.
“I wonder if you would do me another favor? I'm afraid you'll take to avoiding me, if I keep on.”
“I don't think you need fear that.”
“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.
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 no general practitioners; then where will you be?”
“I'll manage somehow,” said his brother placidly. “I guess there will always be a few that can pay my prices better than what you specialists ask.”
Max laughed with genuine amusement.
“I dare say, if this is the way you let them pay your prices.”
He held out the envelope, and the older man colored.
Very proud of Dr. Max was his brother, unselfishly proud, of his skill, of his handsome person, of his easy good manners; very humble, too, of his own knowledge and experience. If he ever suspected any lack of finer fiber in Max, he put the thought away. Probably he was too rigid himself. Max was young, a hard worker. He had a right to play hard.
He prepared his black bag for the day's calls—stethoscope, thermometer, eye-cup, bandages, case of small vials, a lump of absorbent cotton in a not over-fresh towel; in the bottom, a heterogeneous collection of instruments, a roll of adhesive plaster, a bottle or two of sugar-milk tablets for the children, a dog collar that had belonged to a dead collie, and had put in the bag in some curious fashion and there remained.
He prepared the bag a little nervously, while Max ate. He felt that modern methods and the best usage might not have approved of the bag. On his way out he paused at the dining-room door.
“Are you going to the hospital?”
“Operating at four—wish you could come in.”
“I'm afraid not, Max. I've promised Sidney Page to speak about her to you. She wants to enter the training-school.”
“Too young,” said Max briefly. “Why, she can't be over sixteen.”
“She's eighteen.”
“Well, even eighteen. Do you think any girl of that age is responsible enough to have life and death put in her hands? Besides, although I haven't noticed her lately, she used to be a pretty little thing. There is no use filling up the wards with a lot of ornaments; it keeps the internes all stewed up.”
“Since when,” asked Dr. Ed mildly, “have you found good looks in a girl a handicap?”
In the end they compromised. Max would see Sidney at his office. It would be better than having her run across the Street—would put things on the right footing. For, if he did have her admitted, she would have to learn at once that he was no longer “Dr. Max”; that, as a matter of fact, he was now staff, and entitled to much dignity, to speech without contradiction or argument, to clean towels, and a deferential interne at his elbow.
Having given his promise, Max promptly forgot about it. The Street did not interest him. Christine and Sidney had been children when he went to Vienna, and since his return he had hardly noticed them. Society, always kind to single men of good appearance and easy good manners, had taken him up. He wore dinner or evening clothes five nights out of seven, and was supposed by his conservative old neighbors to be going the pace. The rumor had been fed by Mrs. Rosenfeld, who, starting out for her day's washing at six o'clock one morning, had found Dr. Max's car, lamps lighted, and engine going, drawn up before the house door, with its owner asleep at the wheel. The story traveled the length of the Street that day.
“Him,” said Mrs. Rosenfeld, who was occasionally flowery, “sittin' up as straight as this washboard, and his silk hat shinin' in the sun; but exceptin' the car, which was workin' hard and gettin' nowhere, the whole outfit in the arms of Morpheus.”
Mrs. Lorenz, whose day it was to have Mrs. Rosenfeld, and who was unfamiliar with mythology, gasped at the last word.
“Mercy!” she said. “Do you mean to say he's got that awful drug habit!”
Down the clean steps went Dr. Max that morning, a big man, almost as tall as K. Le Moyne, eager of life, strong and a bit reckless, not fine, perhaps, but not evil. He had the same zest of living as Sidney, but with this difference—the girl stood ready to give herself to life: he knew that life would come to him. All-dominating male was Dr. Max, that morning, as he drew on his gloves before stepping into his car. It was after nine o'clock. K. Le Moyne had been an hour at his desk. The McKee napkins lay ironed in orderly piles.
Nevertheless, Dr. Max was suffering under a sense of defeat as he rode downtown. The night before, he had proposed to a girl and had been rejected. He was not in love with the girl,—she would have been a suitable wife, and a surgeon ought to be married; it gives people confidence,—but his pride was hurt. He recalled the exact words of the rejection.
“You're too good-looking, Max,” she had said, “and that's the truth. Now that operations are as popular as fancy dancing, and much less bother, half the women I know are crazy about their surgeons. I'm too fond of my peace of mind.”
“But, good Heavens! haven't you any confidence in me?” he had demanded.
“None whatever, Max dear.” She had looked at him with level, understanding eyes.
He put the disagreeable recollection out of his mind as he parked his car and made his way to his office. Here would be people who believed in him, from the middle-aged nurse in her prim uniform to the row of patients sitting stiffly around the walls of the waiting-room. Dr. Max, pausing in the hall outside the door of his private office, drew a long breath. This was the real thing—work and plenty of it, a chance to show the other men what he could do, a battle to win! No humanitarian was he, but a fighter: each day he came to his office with the same battle lust.
The office nurse had her back to him. When she turned, he faced an agreeable surprise. Instead of Miss Simpson, he faced a young and attractive girl, faintly familiar.
“We tried to get you by telephone,” she explained. “I am from the hospital. Miss Simpson's father died this morning, and she knew you would have to have some one. I was just starting for my vacation, so they sent me.”
“Rather a poor substitute for a vacation,” he commented.
She was a very pretty girl. He had seen her before in the hospital, but he had never really noticed how attractive she was. Rather stunning she was, he thought. The combination of yellow hair and dark eyes was unusual. He remembered, just in time, to express regret at Miss Simpson's bereavement.
“I am Miss Harrison,” explained the substitute, and held out his long white coat. The ceremony, purely perfunctory with Miss Simpson on duty, proved interesting, Miss Harrison, in spite of her high heels, being small and the young surgeon tall. When he was finally in the coat, she was rather flushed and palpitating.
“But I KNEW your name, of course,” lied Dr. Max. “And—I'm sorry about the vacation.”
After that came work. Miss Harrison was nimble and alert, but the surgeon worked quickly and with few words, was impatient when she could not find the things he called for, even broke into restrained profanity now and then. She went a little pale over her mistakes, but preserved her dignity and her wits. Now and then he found her dark eyes fixed on him, with something inscrutable but pleasing in their depths. The situation was rather piquant. Consciously he was thinking only of what he was doing. Subconsciously his busy ego was finding solace after last night's rebuff.
Once, during the cleaning up between cases, he dropped to a personality. He was drying his hands, while she placed freshly sterilized instruments on a glass table.
“You are almost a foreign type, Miss Harrison. Last year, in a London ballet, I saw a blonde Spanish girl who looked like you.”
“My mother was a Spaniard.” She did not look up.
Where Miss Simpson was in the habit of clumping through the morning in flat, heavy shoes, Miss Harrison's small heels beat a busy tattoo on the tiled floor. With the rustling of her starched dress, the sound was essentially feminine, almost insistent. When he had time to notice it, it amused him that he did not find it annoying.
Once, as she passed him a bistoury, he deliberately placed his fine hand over her fingers and smiled into her eyes. It was play for him; it lightened the day's work.
Sidney was in the waiting-room. There had been no tedium in the morning's waiting. Like all imaginative people, she had the gift of dramatizing herself. She was seeing herself in white from head to foot, like this efficient young woman who came now and then to the waiting-room door; she was healing the sick and closing tired eyes; she was even imagining herself proposed to by an aged widower with grown children and quantities of money, one of her patients.
She sat very demurely in the waiting-room with a magazine in her lap, and told her aged patient that she admired and respected him, but that she had given herself to the suffering poor.
“Everything in the world that you want,” begged the elderly gentleman. “You should see the world, child, and I will see it again through your eyes. To Paris first for clothes and the opera, and then—”
“But I do not love you,” Sidney replied, mentally but steadily. “In all the world I love only one man. He is—”
She hesitated here. It certainly was not Joe, or K. Le Moyne of the gas office. It seem to her suddenly very sad that there was no one she loved. So many people went into hospitals because they had been disappointed in love.
“Dr. Wilson will see you now.”
She followed Miss Harrison into the consulting room. Dr. Max—not the gloved and hatted Dr. Max of the Street, but a new person, one she had never known—stood in his white office, tall, dark-eyed, dark-haired, competent, holding out his long, immaculate surgeon's hand, and smiling down at her.
Men, like jewels, require a setting. A clerk on a high stool, poring over a ledger, is not unimpressive, or a cook over her stove. But place the cook on the stool, poring over the ledger! Dr. Max, who had lived all his life on the edge of Sidney's horizon, now, by the simple changing of her point of view, loomed large and magnificent. Perhaps he knew it. Certainly he stood very erect. Certainly, too, there was considerable manner in the way in which he asked Miss Harrison to go out and close the door behind her.
Sidney's heart, considering what was happening to it, behaved very well.
“For goodness' sake, Sidney,” said Dr. Max, “here you are a young lady and I've never noticed it!”
This, of course, was not what he had intended to say, being staff and all that. But Sidney, visibly palpitant, was very pretty, much prettier than the Harrison girl, beating a tattoo with her heels in the next room.
Dr. Max, belonging to the class of man who settles his tie every time he sees an attractive woman, thrust his hands into the pockets of his long white coat and surveyed her quizzically.
“Did Dr. Ed tell you?”
“Sit down. He said something about the hospital. How's your mother and Aunt Harriet?”
“Very well—that is, mother's never quite well.” She was sitting forward on her chair, her wide young eyes on him. “Is that—is your nurse from the hospital here?”
“Yes. But she's not my nurse. She's a substitute.”
“The uniform is so pretty.” Poor Sidney! with all the things she had meant to say about a life of service, and that, although she was young, she was terribly in earnest.
“It takes a lot of plugging before one gets the uniform. Look here, Sidney; if you are going to the hospital because of the uniform, and with any idea of soothing fevered brows and all that nonsense—”
She interrupted him, deeply flushed. Indeed, no. She wanted to work. She was young and strong, and surely a pair of willing hands—that was absurd about the uniform. She had no silly ideas. There was so much to do in the world, and she wanted to help. Some people could give money, but she couldn't. She could only offer service. And, partly through earnestness and partly through excitement, she ended in a sort of nervous sob, and, going to the window, stood with her back to him.
He followed her, and, because they were old neighbors, she did not resent it when he put his hand on her shoulder.
“I don't know—of course, if you feel like that about it,” he said, “we'll see what can be done. It's hard work, and a good many times it seems futile. They die, you know, in spite of all we can do. And there are many things that are worse than death—”
His voice trailed off. When he had started out in his profession, he had had some such ideal of service as this girl beside him. For just a moment, as he stood there close to her, he saw things again with the eyes of his young faith: to relieve pain, to straighten the crooked, to hurt that he might heal,—not to show the other men what he could do,—that had been his early creed. He sighed a little as he turned away.
“I'll speak to the superintendent about you,” he said. “Perhaps you'd like me to show you around a little.”
“When? To-day?”
He had meant in a month, or a year. It was quite a minute before he replied:—
“Yes, to-day, if you say. I'm operating at four. How about three o'clock?”
She held out both hands, and he took them, smiling.
“You are the kindest person I ever met.”
“And—perhaps you'd better not say you are applying until we find out if there is a vacancy.”
“May I tell one person?”
“Mother?”
“No. We—we have a roomer now. He is very much interested. I should like to tell him.”
He dropped her hands and looked at her in mock severity.
“Much interested! Is he in love with you?”
“Mercy, no!”
“I don't believe it. I'm jealous. You know, I've always been more than half in love with you myself!”
Play for him—the same victorious instinct that had made him touch Miss Harrison's fingers as she gave him the instrument. And Sidney knew how it was meant; she smiled into his eyes and drew down her veil briskly.
“Then we'll say at three,” she said calmly, and took an orderly and unflurried departure.
But the little seed of tenderness had taken root. Sidney, passing in the last week or two from girlhood to womanhood,—outgrowing Joe, had she only known it, as she had outgrown the Street,—had come that day into her first contact with a man of the world. True, there was K. Le Moyne. But K. was now of the Street, of that small world of one dimension that she was leaving behind her.
She sent him a note at noon, with word to Tillie at Mrs. McKee's to put it under his plate:—
DEAR MR. LE MOYNE,—I am so excited I can hardly write. Dr. Wilson, the surgeon, is going to take me through the hospital this afternoon. Wish me luck. SIDNEY PAGE.
K. read it, and, perhaps because the day was hot and his butter soft and the other “mealers” irritable with the heat, he ate little or no luncheon. Before he went out into the sun, he read the note again. To his jealous eyes came a vision of that excursion to the hospital. Sidney, all vibrant eagerness, luminous of eye, quick of bosom; and Wilson, sardonically smiling, amused and interested in spite of himself. He drew a long breath, and thrust the note in his pocket.
The little house across the way sat square in the sun. The shades of his windows had been lowered against the heat. K. Le Moyne made an impulsive movement toward it and checked himself.
As he went down the Street, Wilson's car came around the corner. Le Moyne moved quietly into the shadow of the church and watched the car go by.