Unaware of the effort which his former employer's good will was vainly putting forth on his behalf, Josiah arrived in front of his pair of grassplots in Indiana Avenue. It was a trim little place, meeting all the wishes for a roof above his head which his soul had ever formed. He stood and looked at it, thinking of the days when little Gladys used to play "house" beneath one of the umbrella-shaped hydrangea bushes.
That was not so long ago—only six or eight years. It was nine since he had bought Number Eleven, paying out three thousand dollars that had come to him from a matured twenty years' endowment policy, together with another thousand Lizzie had inherited from an aunt. They had thought it a good investment because, if the worst ever came to the worst—and they didn't know what they meant by that—they would always have a home. Now the home was in danger because he couldn't raise a hundred and forty-seven dollars and sixty-three cents. He had been everywhere trying to borrow more, and he had failed. He had got to the point where his acquaintances in the different offices were putting him down as an "old bum." To Josiah, knowing all the shades of meaning in the term, it was a dreadful name as applied to himself; and he had heard it that very afternoon. An old friend, who had promised to lend him five of the hundred and fifteen already raised, had said on seeing him approach:
"Here comes that old bum again."
Josiah had turned about there and then. Giving up trying any more to raise the hundred and forty-seven, he had wandered home. He, Josiah Follett, an old bum!
Having hidden her three volumes under the bed, Jennie looked out and saw him. He didn't look specially dejected, yet she knew he was. She knew it by the way he stared at the hydrangea bush, or by the fact that he had renounced his search for another job so early in the afternoon. Like herself, he seemed thrown on his own resources for company, finding little or nothing there. She ran down to meet him. She would do that rare thing in the Follett family, take him for a walk.
He turned with her obediently. It was a relief to him not to be obliged to go in at once and tell Lizzie he had no good news. Lizzie was still his great referee, as he was hers. The children were still the children, not to be taken into confidence till there was nothing else to be done.
But this afternoon life, for the first time, looked different. It was as if, unaided, he couldn't carry the burden any more. There were younger shoulders than his, and perhaps it was time now to call on them to share the task.
"I'm an old man, Jennie," he said, as they began to move slowly toward Palisade Walk. "I haven't felt old till lately; but now—now I'm all in. I don't suppose I'll ever get a chance to do a day's work again."
When she rallied him on this, he told her the story of his day, omitting the "old bum" incident. He must spare his children that, even if he couldn't have been spared himself.