ring big-game hunter. He never let up
for an afternoon. VanZile had lost interest in the whole matter.
Whenever Carl thought of how much the development of the Touricar
business depended upon himself, he was uneasy about the future, and
bent more closely over his desk. On his way home, swaying on a subway
strap, his pleasant sensation of returning to Ruth was interrupted by
worry in regard to things he might have done at the office. Nights he
dreamed of lists of "prospects."

Late in May he was disturbed for several days by headaches, lassitude,
nausea. He lied to Ruth: "Guess I've eaten something at lunch that was
a little off. You know what these restaurants are." He admitted,
however, that he felt like a Symptom. He stuck to the office, though
his chief emotion about life and business was that he wished to go off
somewhere and lie down and die gently.

Directly after a Sunday bruncheon, at which he was silent and looked
washed out, he went to bed with typhoid fever.

For six weeks he was ill. He seemed daily to lose more of the
boyishness which all his life had made him want to dance in the sun.
That loss was to Ruth like a snickering hobgoblin attending the
specter of death. Staying by him constantly, forgetting, in the
intensity of her care, even to want credit for virtue, taking one
splash at her tired eyes with boric acid and dashing back to his bed,
she mourned and mourned for her lost boy, while she hid her fear and
kept her blouses fresh and her hair well-coiffed, and mothered the
stern man who lay so dreadfully still in the bed.... He was not shaved
every day; he had a pale beard under his hollow cheeks.... Even when
he was out of delirium, even when he was comparatively strong, he
never said anything gaily foolish for the sake of being young and
noisy with her.

During convalescence Carl was so wearily gentle that she hoped the
little boy she loved was coming back to dwell in him. But the Hawk's
wings seemed broken. For the first time Carl was afraid of life. He
sat and worried, going over the possibilities of the Touricar, and the
positions he might get if the Touricar failed. He was willing to loaf
by the window all day, his eyes on a narrow, blood-red stripe in the
Navajo blanket on his knees, along which he incessantly ran a
finger-nail, back and forth, back and forth, for whole quarter-hours,
while she read aloud from Kipling and London and Conrad, hoping to
rekindle the spirit of daring.

One sw