Harvey Bronson glanced at him and felt irritated and aggrieved by his expression. “What call has a dead loss like Lester Knapp got to be looking so doggone satisfied with himself!” he thought.
Chapter 5
THAT afternoon when at half-past four he stepped out on the street again, his long lean face was quite without expression. But it was not sallow. It was very white.
He walked straight before him for a step or two, stopped short and stared fixedly into the nearest show-window, one of Jim McCarthy’s achievements.
Mrs. Prouty happened to stand there too. She was looking at a two-hundred-dollar fur coat as tragically as though it were the Pearly Gates and she sinking to Gehenna. She dreamed at night about that fur coat. She wanted it so that she could think of little else. Unlike Mrs. Merritt, she had no resources of fine old Paisley shawls to fall back on.
She looked up now, saw who had come to a stop beside her, and said, with the professional cordiality of a rector’s wife, “Oh, how do you do, Mr. Knapp,” and was not at all surprised when he did not answer or notice that she was there. Lester Knapp was notoriously absent-minded. It was one of his queer trying ways. He had so many. Poor Mrs. Knapp! But how brave she was about it. It was splendid to see a woman so loyal to a husband who deserved it so little. She looked sideways at him, forgetting for an instant her heartache over the coat. Mercy! What a sickly-looking man! Bent shoulders, hollow chest, ashy-gray skin ... no physique at all. And the father of a family! Such men ought not to be allowed to have children.
The coat caught her eye again, with its basilisk fascination. She sighed and stepped into the store to ask to see it again, although she knew it was as far out of her reach as a diamond tiara. To handle its soft richness made her sick with desire, but she couldn’t keep away from it when she was downtown.
Her moving away startled Lester from his horrified gaze on nothingness, and he moved on with a jerky, galvanized gait like a man walking for the first time after a sickness.
He had lost his job. He had been fired. At the end of the month there would be no money at all to keep things going, not even the little they had always had.