With Bromley gone, he drew the deepest of the easy-chairs up to the table, lighted the gas reading-lamp and tried to lose himself in Howells’s The Lady of the Aroostook, just out in book form; this until it should be time to go out for his dinner in one of the hotels or restaurants. The book failed to hold him, and he threw it aside, struggled into the light overcoat demanded by the night breeze sweeping down from the Snowy Range, and took to the streets.
Since it was still early in the evening the night life of the city had scarcely begun. In Sixteenth Street the horse-cars made cheerful music on the crisp evening air with their jingling bells, and at each corner a group of homing workers waited under the gas street-light to board them. Philip drifted northward in the sidewalk throng, absently oblivious of his surroundings and curiously dissatisfied with himself and the new outlook upon life engendered by the possession of money. The free, hard-working, outdoor year, followed by the golden flood which had swept away the necessity for work of any kind, had broken orderly habit, and a sort of deadening ennui was the result. With all the healthy incentives to effort drowned in the flood, he could settle upon no object that seemed worth while. Upon the first day of his return to Denver he had sent his mother and sisters a sum which, as he knew, would postulate riches to the family of plain-living New England women; but with this dutiful channel filled—choked, for the time being, at least, by the generous stream he had poured into it—he had found no other reasonable use to which the golden surfeit could be put.
While he was still drifting and trying aimlessly to decide where he should go for his solitary dinner, he stepped aside to make room for a group of women workers coming out of a millinery shop. As he did so, two things occurred in swift sequence: he collided violently with a heavy-set man hurrying in the opposite direction, and in the rebound from the collision he found himself clasping a young woman in his arms to keep from knocking her down. Recovering his balance, he was beginning to apologize when the young woman gave a little cry of surprise and called him by name. Then he saw that chance had succeeded where directed effort had failed; that the young woman he had so hastily embraced was Jean Dabney.
It was reticent habit, no less than the lapse of a year, that tied his tongue and made his greeting awkwardly formal; and the inability to be instantly at ease made him rage inwardly. But the young woman helped him out.
“I have wondered, so many times, if we should ever meet again,” she was saying; and by this time he had clubbed his inherited pauciloquy into subjection sufficiently to say:
“I had almost given up the hope. I have been trying all sorts of ways to find out what had become of you.”
“You have? That was kind, and—and neighborly. And I don’t wonder that you couldn’t find us. It has been nearly a year, and everything changes so quickly out here.”
“It does,” he agreed; and then: “Where were you going when I came so near knocking you down?”
“Home—to give the family a surprise. I don’t usually get off before eight or nine at this season of the year.”
“Get off?” he queried.