“What will our comradeship be like, when—when she is Dick’s wife?” he questioned himself, and then fell to work with fury.
Thus the delightful summer died into the past; there came a winter only less good, with its dinners and dances, with quiet fireside evenings, and yet another summer of the same close friendship that began to take on the semblance of a permanent thing in life, all the richer as experience grew deeper and knowledge wider and the best things dearer.
Whether they read or sang or discussed, though the world saw little done, these three young people had the inestimable happiness of knowing one another.
CHAPTER VI
JEWEL WEED
Along the wide straight street of the city surged the usual shopping crowd. Largely petticoated was it, for o’daytimes man must be busy at his office that woman may have this privilege of going shopping. Surely there is no other stream in the wide world that is so monotonous as this human never-ending current. The same types, the same clothes, the same subjects of conversation in the fragments that catch the ear. And seldom does one see a face that looks even cheerful, much less happy,—all intent on matching ribbons.
“The world is too much with us; late and soon;
Getting and spending we lay waste our powers.”
Thus might they cry aloud, if they were condemned to proclaim their sins, like the long banner of bat-like souls that Dante saw passing in similar fashion beneath his eye.