"Writing stories?"
"Well, that, or painting, or illustrating—music, perhaps. Perhaps I could write a play, or act in some other fellow's; or do some damn thing or other—" he ended vaguely. And for the first time Inwood saw that his friend's eyes were weary, and that his face seemed unusually worn. It was plain enough that James Edgerton 3d had already journeyed many a league with Black Care, and that he had not yet outridden that shadowy horseman.
"Jim," said Inwood seriously, "why won't you let me help you—" But Edgerton checked him in a perfectly friendly manner.
"You are helping me," he said; "that's why I'm going about my business. Success to yours, Billy. Good-by! I'll be back"—glancing around the familiar room—"sometime or other; back here and around town, everywhere, as usual," he added confidently; and the haunted look faded. He smiled and nodded with a slight gesture of adieu, picked up his suit cases, and, with another friendly shake of his head for the offers of servants' assistance, walked out into the sunshine of Fifth Avenue, and west toward his own abode in Fifty-sixth Street.
When he arrived there, he was hot and dusty, and he decided to let Kenna carry up his luggage. So he descended to the area.
Every time he pulled the basement bell he could hear it jingle inside the house somewhere, but nobody responded, and after a while he remounted the area steps to the street and glanced up at the brown-stone façade. Every window was shut, every curtain drawn. That block on Fifty-sixth Street on a Sunday morning in early summer is an unusually silent and deserted region. Edgerton looked up and down the sunny street. After Paris the city of his birth seemed very mean and treeless and shabby in the merciless American sunshine.
Fumbling for his keys he wondered to what meaner and shabbier street he might soon be destined, now that fortune had tripped him up; and how soon he would begin to regret the luxury of this dusty block and the comforts of the house which he was now about to enter. And he fitted his latch-key to the front door and let himself in.
It was a very clumsy and old-fashioned apartment house, stupidly built, five stories high; there was only one apartment to a floor, and no elevator. The dark and stuffy austerity of this out-of-date building depressed him anew as he entered. Its tenants, of course, were away from town for the summer—respectable, middle-aged people—stodgy, wealthy, dull as the carved banisters that guarded the dark, gas-lit well of the staircase. Each family owned its own apartment—had been owners for years. Edgerton inherited his floor from an uncle—widely known among earlier generations as a courtly and delightful old gentleman—an amateur of antiquities and the possessor of many very extraordinary things, including his own private character and disposition.
Carrying his suit cases, which were pasted all over with tricolored labels, the young man climbed the first two flights of stairs, and then, placing his luggage on the landing, halted to recover his breath and spirits.
The outlook for his future loomed as dark as the stair well. He sat down on the top step, lighted a cigarette, and gazed up at the sham stained glass in the skylight above. And now for the first time he began to realize something of the hideousness of his present position, his helplessness, unfitted as he was to cope with financial adversity or make an honest living at anything.