ffing laugh,
which he turned into a cough in order to deceive the passers. What sort
of face should he go with to Fulkerson and tell him that he renounced
his employment on 'Every Other Week;' and what should he do when he had
renounced it? Take pupils, perhaps; open a class? A lurid conception
of a class conducted on those principles of shameless flattery at
which Mrs. Horn had hinted--he believed now she had meant to insult
him--presented itself. Why should not he act upon the suggestion? He
thought with loathing for the whole race of women--dabblers in art. How
easy the thing would be: as easy as to turn back now and tell that old
fool's girl that he loved her, and rake in half his millions. Why
should not he do that? No one else cared for him; and at a year's
end, probably, one woman would be like another as far as the love was
concerned, and probably he should not be more tired if the woman were
Christine Dryfoos than if she were Margaret Vance. He kept Alma Leighton
out of the question, because at the bottom of his heart he believed that
she must be forever unlike every other woman to him.

The tide of his confused and aimless reverie had carried him far
down-town, he thought; but when he looked up from it to see where he
was he found himself on Sixth Avenue, only a little below Thirty-ninth
Street, very hot and blown; that idiotic fur overcoat was stifling. He
could not possibly walk down to Eleventh; he did not want to walk even
to the Elevated station at Thirty-fourth; he stopped at the corner to
wait for a surface-car, and fell again into his bitter fancies. After
a while he roused himself and looked up the track, but there was no car
coming. He found himself beside a policeman, who was lazily swinging his
club by its thong from his wrist.

"When do you suppose a car will be along?" he asked, rather in a general
sarcasm of the absence of the cars than in any special belief that the
policeman could tell him.

The policeman waited to discharge his tobacco-juice into the gutter. "In
about a week," he said, nonchalantly.

"What's the matter?" asked Beaton, wondering what the joke could be.

"Strike," said the policeman. His interest in Beaton's ignorance seemed
to overcome his contempt of it. "Knocked off everywhere this morning
except Third Avenue and one or two cross-town lines." He spat again and
kept his bulk at its incline over the gutter to glance at a group of men
on the corner below: They were neatly