"You are doing her a worse wrong than any," he stammered; "she ain't your kind and you don't love her."
His hand whitened in its grip on the door handle, then giving one look at his companion as though he meditated repeating his unfortunate attack upon him, he flung himself out of the door, muttering—
"I've got to get out of here.... I don't dare to stay!"
CHAPTER XI
By the time the sublime spring days came, Fairfax discovered that he needed consolation. He must have been a very stubborn, dull animal, he decided, to have so successfully stuffed down and crushed out Antony Fairfax. Antony Fairfax could not have been much of a man at any time to have gone down so uncomplainingly in the fight.
"A chap who is uniquely an artist and poet," he wrote to his mother, "is not a real man, I reckon."
But he had not described to her what kind of a fellow stood in his stead. Instead of going to church on Sundays he exercised in the free gymnasium, joined a base-ball team—the firemen against the engineers—and read and studied more than he should have done whenever he could keep his eyes open. Then spring came, and he could not deny another moment, another day or another night, that he needed consolation.
The wives and daughters of the railroad hands and officials—those he saw in Nut Street—were not likely to charm his eyes. Fairfax waited for Easter—waited with a strange young crying voice in his heart, a threatening softness around his heart of steel.