The woman was descending.
“He says he wants to see you, sir,” she said rather breathlessly, and I followed her. In the semi-darkness of the stairs I passed the three men who had been with Krebs, and when I reached the open door of his room he was alone. I hesitated just a second, swept by the heat wave that follows sudden shyness, embarrassment, a sense of folly it is too late to avert.
Krebs was propped up with pillows.
“Well, this is good of you,” he said, and reached out his hand across the spread. I took it, and sat down beside the shiny oak bedstead, in a chair covered with tobacco-colored plush.
“You feel better?” I asked.
“Oh, I feel all right,” he answered, with a smile. “It's queer, but I do.”
My eye fell upon the long line of sectional book-cases that lined one side of the room. “Why, you've got quite a library here,” I observed.
“Yes, I've managed to get together some good books. But there is so much to read nowadays, so much that is really good and new, a man has the hopeless feeling he can never catch up with it all. A thousand writers and students are making contributions today where fifty years ago there was one.”
“I've been following your speeches, after a fashion,—I wish I might have been able to read more of them. Your argument interested me. It's new, unlike the ordinary propaganda of—”
“Of agitators,” he supplied, with a smile.