l Garage.
Here Nick shed the loose garments of labour for the fashionably tight
habiliments of leisure. Private chauffeurs whose employers housed their
cars in the Ideal Garage used this nook for a lounge and smoker. Smitty,
Mike, Elmer, and Nick snatched stolen siestas there in the rare absences
of the manager. Sometimes Nick spent the night there when forced to work
overtime. His home life, at best, was a sketchy affair. Here chauffeurs,
mechanics, washers lolled at ease exchanging soft-spoken gossip, motor
chat, speculation, comment, and occasional verbal obscenity. Each
possessed a formidable knowledge of that neighbourhood section of
Chicago known as Hyde Park. This knowledge was not confined to car costs
and such impersonal items, but included meals, scandals, relationships,
finances, love affairs, quarrels, peccadillos. Here Nick often played
his harmonica, his lips sweeping the metal length of it in throbbing
rendition of such sure-fire sentimentality as The Long, Long Trail, or
Mammy, while the others talked, joked, kept time with tapping feet or
wagging heads.

To-day the hot little room was empty except for Nick, shaving before the
cracked mirror on the wall, and old Elmer, reading a scrap of
yesterday's newspaper as he lounged his noon hour away. Old Elmer was
thirty-seven, and Nicky regarded him as an octogenarian. Also, old
Elmer's conversation bored Nick to the point of almost sullen
resentment. Old Elmer was a family man. His talk was all of his
family--the wife, the kids, the flat. A garrulous person, lank, pasty,
dish-faced, and amiable. His half day off was invariably spent tinkering
about the stuffy little flat--painting, nailing up shelves, mending a
broken window shade, puttying a window, playing with his pasty little
boy, aged sixteen months, and his pasty little girl, aged three years.
Next day he regaled his fellow workers with elaborate recitals of his
holiday hours.

"Believe me, that kid's a caution. Sixteen months old, and what does he
do yesterday? He unfastens the ketch on the back-porch gate. We got a
gate on the back porch, see." (This frequent "see" which interlarded
Elmer's verbiage was not used in an interrogatory way, but as a period,
and by way of emphasis. His voice did not take the rising inflection as
he uttered it.) "What does he do, he opens it. I come home, and the wife
says to me: 'Say, you better get busy and fix a new ketch on that gate
to the back porch. Little Elmer, fi