Little Ann began to put her first stitches into a red B. No human being could have told what she thought.
“We mustn't waste time talking about that,” she said. “Let us talk about the page. There are dressmakers, you know. If you could make friends with a dressmaker or two they'd tell you what the wedding things were really made of. Women do like their clothes to be described right.”
CHAPTER III
His work upon the page began the following week. When the first morning of his campaign opened with a tumultuous blizzard, Jim Bowles and Julius Steinberger privately sympathized with him as they dressed in company, but they heard him whistling in his own hall bedroom as he put on his clothes, and to none of the three did it occur that time could be lost because the weather was inhuman. Blinding snow was being whirled through the air by a wind which had bellowed across the bay, and torn its way howling through the streets, maltreating people as it went, snatching their breath out of them, and leaving them gaspingly clutching at hats and bending their bodies before it. Street-cars went by loaded from front to back platform, and were forced from want of room to whizz heartlessly by groups waiting anxiously at street corners.
Tembarom saw two or three of them pass in this way, leaving the waiting ones desperately huddled together behind them. He braced himself and whistled louder as he buttoned his celluloid collar.
“I'm going to get up to Harlem all the same,” he said. “The 'L' will be just as jammed, but there'll be a place somewhere, and I'll get it.”
His clothes were the outwardly decent ones of a young man who must perforce seek cheap clothing-stores, and to whom a ten-dollar “hand-me-down” is a source of exultant rejoicing. With the aid of great care and a straight, well-formed young body, he managed to make the best of them; but they were not to be counted upon for warmth even in ordinarily cold weather. His overcoat was a specious covering, and was not infrequently odorous of naphtha.
“You've got to know something about first aid to the wounded if you live on ten per,” he had said once to Little Ann. “A suit of clothes gets to be an emergency-case mighty often if it lasts three years.”
“Going up to Harlem to-day, T. T.?” his neighbor at table asked him as he sat down to breakfast.