"How much?"
"It was a thousand, but we've got it down to seven hundred—six hundred and sixty," Peter corrected himself with a glance at his honorarium.
"And the farm, it is worth——" Siegel Brother parted his hands slightly to admit of any valuation.
"Two thousand."
"So! Well, Mr. Weatheral, that is not so bad, and if I were you, when I had occasion to speak of it I would say, not 'I am paying a mortgage,' that is dead work, Mr. Weatheral, but 'I am buying a farm.' It goes easier so."
"Thank you, sir, I'll remember." He supposed his employer was done with him, but as he turned to go he heard his name again.
"You will report to our Mr. Croker when you return, Mr. Weatheral; he thinks he can use you."
Two weeks later when he came back rested from Bloombury, Peter found himself visible to at least ten persons, all of whom pertained to the boarding-house of the exclusive Mrs. Blodgett, where, by the advice of J. Wilkinson Cohn, he engaged a small room on the third floor with a window opening some six feet from the rear wall of a wholesale stationery, and one electric light discreetly placed to discourage the habit of reading in bed.
From this time on he was visible to Mrs. Blodgett and Aggie and Miss Thatcher, whom he already knew as the pure food demonstrator in dairy products, to two inconsiderable young women from the wholesale stationer's, and a gentleman from a shoe store, the whole of whose physiognomy appeared to be occupied with the effort to express an engaging youthfulness which the crown of his head explicitly denied. He was occasionally visible to the representative of gentlemen's outfitters who was engaged to Aggie and took Sunday dinners with them, and he was particularly and pleasingly visible to J. Wilkinson Cohn and Miss Minnie Havens. The rest of his fellow boarders were so much of a likeness, a kind of family likeness that spread all over Siegel Brothers and such parts of the city as Peter had been admitted to, that it was a relief to Peter to realize from his profile that J. Wilkinson's last name probably ought to have been spelled Cohen. The determinedly young gentleman explained to him that J. Wilkinson's intrusion into the exclusiveness of Blodgett's was largely a concession to Aggie's being as good as married and not liable to social contamination, and to the fact that the little Jew was amusing and pretty near white, anyway.
Miss Minnie Havens did typewriting and stenography in a downtown office and was understood to be in search of economic independence, rather than under the necessity of making a living. She had a high fluffy pompadour and a half discoverable smile which could be brought to a very agreeable laugh if one spent a little pains at it. J. Wilkinson Cohn appeared to find it worth the pains.