ss business over on Lake Street was magically changed
from a dust-covered, dead-alive concern to an orderly hive that hummed
and glittered with success. Orders poured in. Jo Hertz had inside
information on the War. He knew about troops and horses. He talked with
French and English and Italian buyers--noblemen, many of
them--commissioned by their countries to get American-made supplies. And
now, when he said to Ben or George, "Take f'rinstance your raw hides and
leathers," they listened with respectful attention.

And then began the gay dog business in the life of Jo Hertz. He
developed into a loop-hound, ever keen on the scent of fresh pleasure.
That side of Jo Hertz which had been repressed and crushed and ignored
began to bloom, unhealthily. At first he spent money on his rather
contemptuous nieces. He sent them gorgeous fans, and watch bracelets,
and velvet bags. He took two expensive rooms at a downtown hotel, and
there was something more tear-compelling than grotesque about the way he
gloated over the luxury of a separate ice-water tap in the bathroom. He
explained it.

"Just turn it on. Ice-water! Any hour of the day or night."

He bought a car. Naturally. A glittering affair; in color a bright blue,
with pale-blue leather straps and a great deal of gold fittings and wire
wheels. Eva said it was the kind of a thing a soubrette would use,
rather than an elderly business man. You saw him driving about in it,
red-faced and rather awkward at the wheel. You saw him, too, in the
Pompeiian room at the Congress Hotel of a Saturday afternoon when
doubtful and roving-eyed matrons in kolinsky capes are wont to
congregate to sip pale amber drinks. Actors grew to recognize the
semi-bald head and the shining, round, good-natured face looming out at
them from the dim well of the parquet, 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