Blinker muttered something and plunged northward till he found a cab. A big, gray church loomed slowly at his right. Blinker shook his fist at it through the window.
“I gave you a thousand dollars last week,” he cried under his breath, “and she meets them in your very doors. There is something wrong; there is something wrong.”
At eleven the next day Blinker signed his name thirty times with a new pen provided by Lawyer Oldport.
“Now let me go to the woods,” he said surlily.
“You are not looking well,” said Lawyer Oldport. “The trip will do you good. But listen, if you will, to that little matter of business of which I spoke to you yesterday, and also five years ago. There are some buildings, fifteen in number, of which there are new five-year leases to be signed. Your father contemplated a change in the lease provisions, but never made it. He intended that the parlors of these houses should not be sub-let, but that the tenants should be allowed to use them for reception rooms. These houses are in the shopping district, and are mainly tenanted by young working girls. As it is they are forced to seek companionship outside. This row of red brick—”
Blinker interrupted him with a loud, discordant laugh.
“Brickdust Row for an even hundred,” he cried. “And I own it. Have I guessed right?”
“The tenants have some such name for it,” said Lawyer Oldport.
Blinker arose and jammed his hat down to his eyes.
“Do what you please with it,” he said harshly. “Remodel it, burn it, raze it to the ground. But, man, it’s too late I tell you. It’s too late. It’s too late. It’s too late.”