e
needed the little scrap of money it brought him every Saturday night.
That was it, I knew now.

Knowing it made me sorrier than ever for the old man. Dimly I began to
realize, I think, what his own mental attitude toward his position must
be. Here he was, a mere cub reporter--and a remarkably bad one, a proven
failure--skirmishing round for small, inconsequential items, running
errands really, at an age when most of the men he knew were getting
ready to retire from business. Yet he didn't dare quit. He didn't dare
even to rebel against the slights of the man over him, because he needed
that twelve dollars a week. It was all, no doubt, that stood between him
and actual want. His pride was bleeding to death internally. On top of
all that he was being forced into a readjustment of his whole scheme of
things, at a time of life when its ordered routine was almost as much a
part of him as his hands and feet. As I figured it, he had long before
adjusted his life to his income, cunningly fitting in certain small
luxuries and all the small comforts; and now this income was cut to a
third or a quarter perhaps of its former dimensions. It seemed a pretty
hard thing for the major. It was fierce.

Perhaps my vision was clouded by my sympathy, but I thought Major Stone
aged visibly that summer. Maybe you have noticed how it is with men who
have gone along, hale and stanch, until they reach a certain age. When
they do start to break they break fast. He lost some of his flesh and
most of his rosiness. The skin on his face loosened a little and became
a tallowy yellowish-red, somewhat like a winter-killed apple.

His wardrobe suffered. One day one of his short little shoes was split
across the top just back of the toe cap, and the next morning it was
patched. Pretty soon the other shoe followed suit--first a crack in the
leather, then a clumsy patch over the crack. He wore his black slouch
hat until it was as green in spots as a gage plum; and late in August he
supplanted it with one of those cheap, varnished brown-straw hats that
cost about thirty-five cents apiece and look it.

His linen must have been one of his small extravagances. Those
majestically collared garments with the tremendous plaited bosoms and
the hand worked eyelets, where the three big flat gold studs went in,
never came ready made from any shop. They must have been built to his
measure and his order. Now he wore them until there were gaped places
between the pl