Clif sat up worrying, and admitting the truth of Martin’s several observations. Next day—he had a way with women when he deigned to take the trouble—he pumped the dean’s girl secretary, and discovered his fate. There had been a meeting of a faculty committee; the blame for the Benoni Carr outrage had been placed on Clif; and the dean had said all the things Clif had imagined, with a number which he had not possessed the talent to conceive. But the dean was not going to summon him at once; he was going to keep him waiting in torture, then execute him in public.
“Good-by, old M.D. degree! Rats, I never thought much of the doctor business. Guess I’ll be a bond salesman,” said Clif to Martin. He strolled away, he went to the dean, and remarked:
“Oh, Dean Silva, I just dropped in to tell you I’ve decided to resign from the medic school. Been offered a big job in, uh, in Chicago, and I don’t think much of the way you run the school, anyway. Too much memorizing and too little real spirit of science. Good luck, Doc. So long.”
“Gggggg—” said Dean Silva.
Clif moved into Zenith, and Martin was left alone. He gave up the double room at the front of his boarding-house for a hall-room at the rear, and in that narrow den he sat and mourned in a desolation of loneliness. He looked out on a vacant lot in which a tattered advertisement of pork and beans flapped on a leaning billboard. He saw Leora’s eyes and heard Clif’s comfortable scoffing, and the quiet was such as he could not endure.
CHAPTER IX
I
The persistent yammer of a motor horn drew Martin to the window of the laboratory, a late afternoon in February. He looked down on a startling roadster, all streamlines and cream paint, with enormous headlights. He slowly made out that the driver, a young man in coffee-colored loose motor coat and hectic checked cap and intense neckwear, was Clif Clawson, and that Clif was beckoning.
He hastened down, and Clif cried:
“Oh, boy! How do you like the boat? Do you diagnose this suit? Scotch heather—honest! Uncle Clif has nabbed off a twenty-five-buck-a-week job with commissions, selling autos. Boy, I was lost in your old medic school. I can sell anything to anybody. In a year I’ll be making eighty a week. Jump in, old son. I’m going to take you in to the Grand and blow you to the handsomest feed you ever stuffed into your skinny organism.”