Hanging up the receiver, Vivian purchased a five-cent box of blacking, a commodity not ranking among Meeghan's best sellers, and returned to make ready for his professional rounds. In the closet of his bedroom, where he went for hat and coat, he was struck with the brooding sense of something lost, and readily recalled the episode of the trousers. He became conscious of a certain feeling of destitution. Undoubtedly the whole question of new clothes would have to be taken up seriously some day. For the present there did not lack a sense of economic precariousness: it was he and these trousers against the world....
While brushing his hat in the bedroom, Vivian wondered if Mister had yet donned the gift articles, and how he looked in them. He fell to musing about Kern's erring parent, thinking what a strange life he led. It was many and many a year ago since Mister and society had parted company; and through all this time, it was certain that every hand had been against him. In many cities he had stood before sarcastic judges, and been sent on to serve his little time. Adown highways unnumbered he had sawed wood, when necessary; received handouts, worn hand-me-downs; furnished infinite material for the wags of the comic press. Long he had slept under hedges and in ricks, carried his Lares in a bandana kerchief, been forcibly bathed at free lodging-houses in icy winters. Dogs had chased him, and his fellow man: he had been bitten by the one and smitten by the other. Ill-fame and obloquy had followed him like a shadow. And yet--so strong and strange are our ruling passions--nothing could wean him from the alluring feckless ways which had heaped all these disasters upon him....
Thus and otherwise philosophizing, V. Vivian slipped on his overcoat (which had so far escaped Mr. Garland's requisitions) and flung wide the office windows to rid his chambers of the medical smell. He had had a busy morning, his habit of having no billheads, while regarded as demoralizing by professional brethren of the neighborhood, being clearly gratifying to the circumambient laity. It was now getting toward noon, and the doctor was in a hurry. Besides calls on his sick, he was very anxious to get uptown before dinner and inquire after his uncle Armistead Beirne, who had lain ill, with a heavy, rather alarming illness, since a day or two after his New Year's reception. This call was purely avuncular, so to say, Mr. Beirne employing a reliable physician of his own....
The young man picked up his doctor's bag and opened the door. At the far end of the long hall, where the Garlands' apartments were, he caught a glimpse of a skirt, just whisking out of sight. He thought he recognized the skirt, which was a red one, and called, in surprise:
"Corinne!"
There was no answer.
"Corinne!" he called, louder. "Is that you?"
Sure enough, Kern's face peeped out of a door, a long distance away.
"It's me, and it ain't me," she cried, mockingly. "I'm here in-cog."
And her head bobbed back out of sight again.