A laugh went round the table. The habits of the Man of the World were notoriously conducive to sleeplessness. Late suppers too often robbed him of the slumber due his years.
The laughter offended him. He rose with dignity and went away. When I followed him a few minutes later I found him sulking in the hall. The look of age in his blue eyes moved me to pity, and I drew the Man of the World toward me, as if he were a child.
I do not know what I said to him. It was something about changing all this, and beginning over again, without the smoking and the cards and the horses. He did not mind. In fact, he seemed to like having me touch him, and laid his cheek against my hand, very much as Jean liked to do. But he straightened up again.
“No,” he said firmly, “you are barking up the wrong tree. I mean,—I beg your pardon,—it doesn’t do any good. I might have done it once, but I can’t now.” And saying “Good morning” very courteously, he went up to his room.
I had promised the Doctor to visit with her a patient on Traffic Street, near Edgerley Bend. For once even the Doctor had lost courage. As we threaded our way along the crowded sidewalks of the East End she bewailed her unfitness for her work. Evidently she was disheartened because she could not cure the incurable.
I walked on in silence, too miserable to speak. The air was stifling, for there seemed to be but little space between the sky and the mud in the street. Gazing at the faces that drifted past us, some bad, some apathetic, some despairing, I wondered which were the more pitiful, those that had lost hope, or those that had never known it.
The Doctor’s mood changed when she reached her patient and found something to do; but I, who had not that means of relief, came home as wretched as before.
In the afternoon I went to Janet for comfort. As I crossed the street, the quaint stucco houses looked more than ever like the scenery of a stage. Through the half-drawn curtains I caught a glimpse of the Lad, and smiled. The play had really begun.
I had come for consolation, but I was disappointed. The Lad was alone with baby Jean. He looked up when I entered, and I saw that his eyes were clouded.
“Isn’t it cold?” he said, with an absentminded air.