“Why?” he asked, jocularly. “Do I snore so?”
“Yes, but that’s not it. It may feel good to have the whole bed to yourself.”
“Well, I believe it would.”
In the spare room, close to the springs, on a narrow, single bed, Mrs. Warrener crept alone. She drew the adjusting electric light close to her and took her book up again to re-read, her elbow in the pillow and her cheek on her hand. She followed the printed lines with dawning interest on her face, and a growing intelligence, until all of a sudden the dead stillness of the hour and time struck her. The fireless room—for there was no steam heat in it—gave her a chill. She put out the light and drew the coverlet about her and settled down to sleep.
CHAPTER III.
The business interest of which George Warrener formed a humble part had no picturesque traditions. Like everything else in New York, the corporation had even during Warrener’s time boasted several different addresses. When especial advantages presented themselves in the shape of higher buildings and higher rent, Harkweather & Fulsome moved. The unstableness, the constant transition, had an effect upon him which he did not appreciate. Warrener, with his firm, was restless; and restless with his eighty million fellow Americans.
Harkweather & Fulsome’s last move had been to a twenty-two-floored steel structure, from whose tenth story were visible the roofs of the buildings not yet razed to make room for other giant office honeycombs. Money, at Harkweather & Fulsome’s, superseded everything else in the world, extinguished the lights of pleasure, destroyed even the capacity to enjoy. Everything else was crowded out of the question. Harkweather & Fulsome were “strictly business,” strictly getters of wealth; and they squeezed dry every sponge that came to their hands.
Warrener, in the office, had drifted into the position of confidential clerk, very much used when wanted, and shifted off into a little, stuffy room, where he had a desk and typewriter, when his services were not in active demand. Here he copied, filed and noted; added, opened and docketed mail; and read the financial news in every available sheet in the city. To his own thinking, he was an authority on stocks and bonds. He heard innumerable tips thrown out; saw them acted upon, and prove either valuable or worthless; followed the rise and fall of fortunes near and far; assisted at failures and successes; and during the hours of his routine in the office had the sensation of being himself a millionaire! But when he left the ferry, the bondholders and “big men” hurried to their more important trains and more important stations, and Warrener hustled himself, with his evening papers, into the short train of the Slocum local, he then distinctly felt the difference between his bank balance and his chief’s! He lived in the atmosphere of money, but he had never been ambitious. Of average intelligence, common school education, steady-going and trustworthy, he had no intentions further than to pay his bills, earn his salary and keep at the business.
Were he asked what part of his life he recalled with most pleasure he would have unhesitatingly answered: “Getting engaged and going on our honeymoon.” The sentimental period—which had come into his unimaginative life with the imperiousness of that passion which at least once during a man’s life changes his existence for a time, short or long—had for Warrener left behind it a memory which the cares of the world, the moth and rust of vulgar routine, trains and ferries, quick lunches and elevators, common surroundings and abasing ideals, overlaid but never destroyed.
Eight years before he had asked the prettiest girl he knew to marry him, and she had said yes. His vacation falling at this time, they had spent two weeks in August at Far Rockaway, and from there went directly into the rented house on Grand Street, and the newly married man began his bi-daily pilgrimages on the train.