Parker Steel studied his boots.
“Poor devil, he made a pretty mess of a first-class practice. They were hard up, too, I imagine. Damages and costs must have cleared out most of Murchison’s investments, and their furniture sold dirt cheap. I can’t tell why the ass did not try to sell the practice.”
“Pride, I suppose.”
“It meant making me a present of most of his best patients.”
“My dear Parker, never complain.”
“Hardly, when we should be booking between two and three thousand a year—at least. Well, I must turn out again before dinner.”
The physician returned to his fur coat and his brougham, leaving Mrs. Betty fondling Mignon and her kittens.
CHAPTER XX
A hundred rows of mud-colored brick “boxes,” set face to face and back to back. Scores of cobbled streets, a gray band of stone, and two gray bands of slate. Interminable brown doors and dingy windows; interminable black and sour back yards, festoons of sodden underclothing, moping chickens caged up in corners, rubbish, broken boxes, cinder heaps, and smoke.
Hardness in every outline, in the dirty, yellow-walled houses, in the faces of the women, and in the crude straightness of every street. An atmosphere of granite, brick, cast-iron, and slate. No softness of contour, no flow of curves, no joy in the sweep of land or sky. The color scheme a smirch of gray, yellow, and dingy red. Scarcely a streak of green in the monotonous streets. The sky itself, at best a dusty blue, sliced up into lengths by slate roofs and cast-iron gutters.