Justin wheeled a chair around with an instantly brightened face. “Sit down. I’m mighty glad to see you.” He looked smilingly at his visitor, whose presence, long-limbed, straight, clean, and clear-eyed, always elicited a peculiar admiration from other men. “I heard that you had a room at the Snows’ now, while Billy is away, but I haven’t laid eyes on you for a month.”
“I’ve been coming in on a later train every morning and going out again on a very much later one at night. I’m back in town on the paper for a while.”
“Why don’t you settle down to something worth while?” asked Justin, with the reserved disapproval of the business man for any mode of life but his own.
“Settle down to this kind of thing?” said Girard thoughtfully. “Well, I did think of it last year, when I undertook those commissions for you. But what’s the use—yet awhile, at any rate? You see, I can always make enough money for what I want and to spare, and there’s nobody else to care. I like my liberty! The love of trade doesn’t take hold of me, somehow—and you have to have such a tremendous amount of capital to keep your place. By the way, have you sold the island yet?” The island was a small one up near Nova Scotia, taken once for a debt.
“Not yet.”
Girard gave him a quick glance—with the instant penetration of a man who has known hard times himself, he detected the signs of it in another; the perception lent a sort of under-warmth and kindness to his voice as he asked: “How are things going with you?”
“Fine,” said Justin in a conventionally prosperous tone, with a sudden sight of a bottomless pit yawning below him. “I’ve had a few things on my mind lately—but they’re all right now. By the way, how do you like it at the Snows’?”
“Oh, fairly well.” Girard’s gray eyes twinkled in an irrepressible smile. “I score high at present. They all approve of me, and I am told that I am the only man who has never run into the Boston fern or got tangled in the Wandering Jew. Miss Bertha and I have long talks together—she’s great. As for Mrs. Snow—she heard Sutton speak of her the other night to Ada as ‘the old lady.’ I assure you that since—” He shook his head, and both men laughed.
“Come to see us. Miss Linden is back with us again,” said Justin hospitably, indescribably cheered by some soul-offered sympathy that lay below the trivial converse.
“Thank you,” said Girard, an indefinable stiffening change coming over him momentarily, to disappear at once, however, as he went on: “By the way, I mustn’t forget what I came for before I hurry off.”