"Oh"—he rumpled his hair again—"what's the use?"
"Why, that's no way to talk. Aren't you doing ANYTHING?"
"Not much," he grinned boyishly.
"But, John, that's sheer laziness! How do you ever expect to get out of the groove, if you don't make a start?"
"Oh, damn it all, Martie," he said mildly, with a whimsical smile, "what's the use? I suppose there isn't a furniture clerk in the city that doesn't feel he is fit for great things!"
"You didn't talk like this last year," Martie said, in disappointment and reproach. John looked at her uneasily, and then said boldly:
"How's Ted?"
"Sweet." Martie laid one hand on her breast, and drew a short, stifled breath. "Isn't it fearful?" she said, of the heat.
John nodded absently: she knew him singularly unaffected by anything so trivial as mere heat or cold. He was fingering a magazine carelessly, suddenly he flung it aside.
"I am writing something, of course!" he confessed. "But it seems sort of rotten, to me."