“Then, Miss Willard, you're employing Cyrus Murphy. Do you think I'll sculp up like a Murphy?”
“I don't think you'll sculp up like a Murphy at all, and I've too many friends who are Murphys to believe that you are one. In fact, I could do you much better if I knew what you are.”
“That's quite simple. I'm a suicide. I walked right spang over the edge of life and disappeared. Splash! Bubble-bubble! There goes nothing. The only difference between me and a real suicide is that I have to eat. At times it's difficult.”
“Haven't you any trade? Can't you do anything?” With a sweep of her little hand she indicated the bustling activities with which the outer streets whirred. “Isn't there any place for you in all this?”
He contemplated the world's work as exemplified around Our Square. His gaze came to rest upon a steam-roller, ponderously clanking over a railed-off portion of the street. “I suppose I could run that.”
“Could you? That's a man's job at least. Have you ever run one?”
“No, but I know I could. Any kind of machinery just eats out of my hand.”
“Well, that's something. It's better than being a model. Be at my house tomorrow at nine please.”
For an hour thereafter Cyrus the Gaunt sat on the bench musing upon a small, flower-like, almost absurdly efficient young person who had contracted, as he viewed it, to inject light and color into life at fifty cents an hour, and who had plainly intimated that, in her view, he was not a man. It was that precise opinion expressed by another and a very unlike person which was responsible for his being where he was. At that time it had made him furious. Now it made him thoughtful.
Presently he went through his pockets, reckoned his assets, rose up from the bench, and made a trip to MacLachan's “Home of Fashion,” where he left his clothes to be pressed overnight. In the morning he reappeared again, shaved to the closest limit of human endurance, and thus addressed the Scot:—