Anthony was surrounded by people—the room was half full of them, elbowing each other about.
“Paint the walls,” advised Lockwood.
“There are imitation-leather papers,” said Cathcart, with the air of one condescending to lower a high standard for the sake of those who could not live up to it.
“I suppose so,” admitted Anthony, “at four dollars a roll. I saw a simple thing on that order that struck me the other day at Heminways’. I thought it might be about forty cents a roll. It was a dollar a square yard. I told them I would think it over. I haven’t got through thinking it over yet.”
“You want a plate-rail,” said Wayne Carey.
“What for?”
“Why, to put plates, and steins, and things on.”
“Haven’t a plate—or a stein. Baby has a silver mug. Would that do?”
Cathcart smiled in a superior way. “You had a lot of mighty fine stuff in your Yale days,” he remarked. “Pity you let it all go.”
“I shouldn’t have cared for that truck now,” Anthony declared easily, though he deceived nobody by it. Most of them remembered, if Cathcart had forgotten, how the college boy had sacrificed all his treasures at a blow when the news of his family’s misfortunes had come. It had yielded little enough, after all, to throw into the abyss of their sudden poverty, but the act had proved the spirit of the elder son of the house.