the theater, and sometimes, in a musical show, they directed a quip
at him, and he liked it. He could pick out the critics as they came
down the aisle, and even had a nodding acquaintance with two of them.

"Kelly, of the Herald," he would say carelessly. "Bean, of the Trib.
They're all afraid of him."

So he frolicked, ponderously. In New York he might have been called a
Man About Town.

And he was lonesome. He was very lonesome. So he searched about in
his mind and brought from the dim past the memory of the luxuriously
furnished establishment of which he used to dream in the evenings when
he dozed over his paper in the old house on Calumet. So he rented an
apartment, many-roomed and expensive, with a manservant in charge, and
furnished it in styles and periods ranging through all the Louis. The
living room was mostly rose color. It was like an unhealthy and
bloated boudoir. And yet there was nothing sybaritic or uncleanly in
the sight of this paunchy, middle-aged man sinking into the
rosy-cushioned luxury of his ridiculous home. It was a frank and naive
indulgence of long-starved senses, and there was in it a great
resemblance to the rolling-eyed ecstasy of a schoolboy smacking his
lips over an all-day sucker.

The war went on, and on, and on. And the money continued to roll in--a
flood of it. Then, one afternoon, Eva, in town on shopping bent,
entered a small, exclusive, and expensive shop on Michigan Avenue.
Eva's weakness was hats. She was seeking a hat now. She described
what she sought with a languid conciseness, and stood looking about her
after the saleswoman had vanished in quest of it. The room was
becomingly rose-illumined and somewhat dim, so that some minutes had
passed before she realized that a man seated on a raspberry brocade
settee not five feet away--a man with a walking stick, and yellow
gloves, and tan spats, and a check suit--was her brother Jo. From him
Eva's wild-eyed glance leaped to the woman who was trying on hats
before one of the many long mirrors. She was seated, and a saleswoman
was exclaiming discreetly at her elbow.

Eva turned sharply and encountered her own saleswoman returning
hat-laden. "Not today," she gasped. "I'm feeling ill. Suddenly." And
almost ran from the room.

That evening she told Stell, relating her news in that telephone pidgin
English devised by every family of married sisters as protection
against the neighbors. Translated, it ran thus: