The Dummy was sitting on a bench, with the parrot on his knee looking rather queer from being smuggled about under a coat and fed the curious things that the Dummy thought a bird should eat. It had a piece of apple pie in its claw now.
"Cold beer!" said the parrot, and eyed the interne crookedly.
The Dummy had not heard him, of course. He sat looking over the parapet toward the river, with one knotted hand smoothing the bird's ruffled plumage and such a look of wretchedness in his eyes that it hurt to see it. God's fools, who cannot reason, can feel. Some instinct of despair had seized him for its own—some conception, perhaps, of what life would never mean to him. Before it, the interne's wrath gave way to impotency.
"Cold beer!" said the parrot wickedly.
IV
The Avenue Girl improved slowly. Morning and evening came the Dummy and smiled down at her, with reverence in his eyes. She could smile back now and sometimes she spoke to him. There was a change in the Avenue Girl. She was less sullen. In the back of her eyes each morning found a glow of hope—that died, it is true, by noontime; but it came again with the new day.
"How's Polly this morning, Montmorency?" she would say, and give him a bit of toast from her breakfast for the bird. Or: "I wish you could talk, Reginald. I'd like to hear what Rose said when you took the parrot. It must have been a scream!"
He brought her the first chrysanthemums of the fall and laid them on her pillow. It was after he had gone, while the Probationer was combing out the soft short curls of her hair, that she mentioned the Dummy. She strove to make her voice steady, but there were tears in her eyes.
"The old goat's been pretty good to me, hasn't he?" she said.
"I believe it is very unusual. I wonder"—the Probationer poised the comb—"perhaps you remind him of some one he used to know."