"You'll do what you can for the organization in your precinct?"
"Sure."
"And we won't forget you."
"Thanks, Ed, that's mighty fine of you."
They shook hands; then Jim felt his fingers closing over a ten-dollar bill which had been pressed into his palm. It was easy money, he thought, as he paddled home in his cap and slippers. All he'd have to do to earn it would be to get around among the neighbors evenings for a couple or three weeks.
When Georgia, who had been waiting up for him with a peculiar fluttering of the heart each time that she heard a step on the stairs, found that he was entirely sober, she kissed him of her own accord.
XXVI
EVE
Some six months later, on a hot, sticky afternoon in July, Georgia came away from a State Street department store carrying a paper-wrapped parcel under her arm. She had come down town to take advantage of an odds and ends sale of white goods advertised that morning.
In spite of the heat which beat down from a cloudless, windless sky and radiated up from the stone pavements where it had stored itself, she wore a long bluish-gray pongee coat. There were dark rings under her eyes and she felt ill and dispirited as she waited at Dearborn and Randolph for a North Clark Street car, which would drop her a block nearer her flat than the L would.