Davy Junior and the panic came at the same time.
And with them came Worry.
The wise statesmen and newspapers offered many explanations of the panic. But explanations could not soften the grim fact. Ruin stalked through the land, and its ghostly twin, Fear. Men who had been accounted rich, men who had been rich, heard the approach of the fearsome twain and trembled. And what shall be said of their dependents, the small fry, earners of salaries, young men of the professions, who saw incomes curtailed or cut off; to whom frank poverty would have been almost a relief but who must, as habit and the custom, of their kind decreed, keep up their sham and shabby gentility?
Business was at a standstill. The city ceased to expand. There was no building. Dick Holden closed his desk and locked his office door.
"There'll be nothing doing in our line for some while. I'm going to
Europe for two or three months to learn something about architecture.
Better pack up your family and come along, Davy."
David laughed grimly. "My Dickybird, you're quite a joker."
Trips to Europe!—when the apartment was a miniature hospital. Davy Junior was sickly. Shirley's strength came back slowly. For six weeks the trained nurse stayed, ordering expensive things for her patients.
Anxiously David saw his scanty resources dwindling fast. One by one his old commissions were paid and disappeared down the hopper of household expenses. He took to thinking of what would happen when the commissions were all paid, and to haunting Fisher's office. Fisher was his contractor client and owed him five hundred dollars. But Fisher always put him off.
In the meantime the dairy lunch became a habit. He smoked only a pipe now. The books he loved and needed, little things he used to think were necessaries, were foregone. He thought wistfully of the indulgences he might have gone without in the past.
Fisher continued to put him off. Then Worry began to shadow David by day, to share his pillow at night. If Fisher, like so many others, should fail—! But with an effort he concealed the unbidden guest from Shirley. With her he was always cheery, ready with quip and laugh, teasing her over her devotion to that red-faced bit of humanity, hight Davy Junior. And in truth, the sight of her, still weak and fragile but happy in the possession of her baby, would give him a fresh courage. Things couldn't happen to hurt her, he assured himself. For her, for them; he would weather the storm—somehow. "Why," thus he would snub intrusive Worry, "we've got Fisher, anyhow. When he pays, we'll simply make it last until business picks up." . . . .