For weeks Winn lived an aimless life without occupation, which to him meant misery. He walked the streets to be jostled by people in a hurry, and wished that he also was. He looked into shop windows where dummies stood clad in beautiful garments, and wondered how Mona would look if robed in such. He met people hurrying home from their work at night and almost envied them. In his club he felt so ill at ease that games, conversation, and even the raillery of Jack Nickerson bored him. He had a pleasant home, where his aunt always thought of his comfort; he escorted her to church with regularity; read the daily papers; called on Ethel occasionally, to find her always the same sweet temptation. She neither allured nor repelled, but was always the same piquant and yet sympathetic friend, well poised and sensible, who judged all men and spoke of them as a mixture of nobility and selfish conceit in unequal parts, with the latter predominating. To Winn she sometimes talked as though he were still a big boy who needed guidance, and then again as if he were more than mortal and out of place in a bad world.
"You are discontented," she said to him one evening, "and out of your sphere among the city men. You take right and wrong too seriously and are like an eagle caged with jackdaws. City men are such in the main, thinking more about the cut of their coats, the fit of their linen, and color of their ties than of aught else. You are as unlike them as when you came here a big boy with countryisms clinging to you and the scent of new mown hay perfuming your impulses; you were always out of place here, and the three months on that island has made you more so."
It was a truthful and yet somewhat flattering portrayal of Winn as he really did seem to her, but it only added to his discontent.
"What you say may be true enough," he answered, "but what shall I do? I can't go into an office again and be content, the taste of being my own master on the island has spoiled me for that. I would go into some business if only I had the capital, but I haven't; and I wouldn't ask my aunt to loan me any, even under the existing circumstances."
"I wish I could advise you," she replied in the sympathetic tone so easily at her command. "I certainly would if I could. But whatever you do, don't go into the stock gambling. I respect you now, and I might not then."
The time came when she wished that she had refrained from that expression.
But a different trend of advice came to Winn later from Jack Nickerson.
"Why don't you open a bucket shop, my boy," said that cynic, "and make some money? I'll back you for a few thousand to start, since you were foolish enough to part with all Page made for you out of the Rockhaven flurry, and it's a dead sure thing. Then again you have won quite a little notoriety out of this Weston & Hill fiasco, and men on the street say you have a cool, level head. I tell you, open up one of those joints and let these smart Alecs who want to get rich quick come in and lose their money. If you keep moping around another month you will go daft, or fall in love with Ethel Sherman over again, which means the same. I hear you are a frequent caller there."
"I've got to spend my time somewhere," answered Winn, rather doggedly, "and Ethel's good company."
Jack eyed him curiously.