Not one of them was written for an artist who had been forced by hard luck to turn into a day labourer. All the beautiful things he read made him suffer and desire and long, and worse still, made him rebel. One phrase out of Werther lingered and fascinated him—
"The miseries of mankind would be lighter if—God knows why this is so—if they would not use all their imagination to remember their miseries and to recall to themselves the souvenirs of their unhappy past."
The unhappy past! Well, was it not sad at his age to have a past so melancholy that one could not recall it without tears?
Every one but Sanders came to see him, and jolly him up. Joe Mead gave him to understand that he only lived for the time when Tony should come back to feed "the Girl," as he called his engine. Tony looked at his chief out of cavernous eyes. Joe Mead had on his Sunday clothes and would not light his cigar out of deference to Tony's sick-room.
"You're forty, Mead, aren't you?"
"About that, I guess."
"And I am only twenty-three," returned Fairfax.
"Is that going to be a picture of me at forty?" he thought, and answered himself violently: "My mother's pride and mine forbid."
"Sanders doesn't come to see me, Joe?"
"Nope," returned the other, "you bet your life. If he ain't waiting for you at the door with a gun when you come down it's only because he is off on his job."