第82章

But you weren't looking for pity--and that was what I liked.And it made me feel you had the stuff in you.I'd not waste breath teaching a whiner or a cheap skate.You couldn't be cheap if you tried.The reason I talk to you about these things is so you'll learn to put the artistic touches by instinct into what you do.""You've taken too much trouble for me," said the girl.

"Don't you believe it, my dear," laughed he."If I can do with you what I hope--I've an instinct that if I win out for you, I'll come into my own at last.""You've taught me a lot," said she.

"I wonder," replied he."That is, I wonder how much you've learned.Perhaps enough to keep you--not to keep from being knocked down by fate, but to get on your feet afterward.I hope so--I hope so."They dropped coffee, bought milk by the bottle, he smuggling it to their rooms disguised as a roll of newspapers.They carried in rolls also, and cut down their restaurant meals to supper which they got for twenty-five cents apiece at a bakery restaurant in Seventh Street.There is a way of resorting to these little economies--a snobbish, self-despairing way--that makes them sordid and makes the person indulging in them sink lower and lower.But Burlingham could not have taken that way.

He was the adventurer born, was a hardy seasoned campaigner who had never looked on life in the snob's way, had never felt the impulse to apologize for his defeats or to grow haughty over his successes.Susan was an apt pupil; and for the career that lay before her his instructions were invaluable.He was teaching her how to keep the craft afloat and shipshape through the worst weather that can sweep the sea of life.

"How do you make yourself look always neat and clean?" he asked.

She confessed: "I wash out my things at night and hang them on the inside of the shutters to dry.They're ready to wear again in the morning.""Getting on!" cried he, full of admiration."They simply can't down us, and they might as well give up trying.""But I don't look neat," sighed she."I can't iron.""No--that's the devil of it," laughed he.He pulled aside his waistcoat and she saw he was wearing a dickey."And my cuffs are pinned in," he said."I have to be careful about raising and lowering my arms.""Can't I wash out some things for you?" she said, then hurried on to put it more strongly."Yes, give them to me when we get back to the hotel.""It does help a man to feel he's clean underneath.And we've got nothing to waste on laundries.""I wish I hadn't spent that fifteen cents to have my heels straightened and new steels put in them." She had sat in a cobbler's while this repair to the part of her person she was most insistent upon had been effected.

He laughed."A good investment, that," said he."I've been noticing how you always look nice about the feet.Keep it up.

The surest sign of a sloven and a failure, of a moral, mental, and physical no-good is down-at-the-heel.Always keep your heels straight, Lorna."And never had he given her a piece of advice more to her liking.

She thought she knew now why she had always been so particular about her boots and shoes, her slippers and her stockings.He had given her a new confidence in herself--in a strength within her somewhere beneath the weakness she was always seeing and feeling.

Not until she thought it out afterward did she realize what they were passing through, what frightful days of failure he was enduring.He acted like the steady-nerved gambler at life that he was.He was not one of those more or less weak losers who have to make desperate efforts to conceal a fainting heart.His heart was not fainting.He simply played calmly on, feeling that the next throw was as likely to be for as against him.She kept close to her room, walking about there--she had never been much of a sitter--thinking, practicing the new songs he had got for her--character songs in which he trained her as well as he could without music or costume or any of the accessories.He also had an idea for a church scene, with her in a choir boy's costume, singing the most moving of the simple religious songs to organ music.She from time to time urged him to take her on the rounds with him.But he stood firm, giving always the same reason of the custom in the profession.Gradually, perhaps by some form of that curious process of infiltration that goes on between two minds long in intimate contact, the conviction came to her that the reason he alleged was not his real reason; but as she had absolute confidence in him she felt that there was some good reason or he would not keep her in the background--and that his silence about it must be respected.So she tried to hide from him how weary and heartsick inaction was making her, how hard it was for her to stay alone so many hours each day.

As he watched her closely, it soon dawned on him that something was wrong, and after a day or so he worked out the explanation.

He found a remedy--the reading room of the public library where she could make herself almost content the whole day long.

He began to have a haggard look, and she saw he was sick, was keeping up his strength with whisky."It's only this infernal summer cold I caught in the smashup," he explained."I can't shake it, but neither can it get me down.I'd not dare fall sick.What'd become of _us_?"She knew that "us" meant only herself.Her mind had been aging rapidly in those long periods of unbroken reflection.To develop a human being, leave him or her alone most of the time; it is too much company, too little time to digest and assimilate, that keep us thoughtless and unformed until life is half over.She astonished him by suddenly announcing one evening: