rning out brilliant political stuff at spasmodic intervals.
He was not capable of any sustained effort. He never would be again;
that was plain. He was growing restless and dissatisfied. He spoke
of New York as though it were Valhalla. He said that he hadn't seen a
pretty girl since he left Forty-second street. He laughed at Milwaukee's
quaint German atmosphere. He sneered at our journalistic methods, and
called the newspapers "country sheets," and was forever talking of the
World, and the Herald, and the Sun, until the men at the Press Club
fought shy of him. Norah had found quiet and comfortable quarters
for Peter in a boarding-house near the lake, and just a square or two
distant from my own boarding-house. He hated it cordially, as only the
luxury-loving can hate a boarding-house, and threatened to leave daily.

"Let's go back to the big town, Dawn, old girl," he would say. "We're
buried alive in this overgrown Dutch village. I came here in the first
place on your account. Now it's up to you to get me out of it. Think of
what New York means! Think of what I've been! And I can write as well as
ever."

But I always shook my head. "We would not last a month in New York,
Peter. New York has hurried on and left us behind. We're just two pieces
of discard. We'll have to be content where we are."

"Content! In this silly hole! You must be mad!" Then, with one of his
unaccountable changes of tone and topic, "Dawn, let me have some
money. I'm strapped. If I had the time I'd get out some magazine stuff.
Anything to get a little extra coin. Tell me, how does that little
sport you call Blackie happen to have so much ready cash? I've never yet
struck him for a loan that he hasn't obliged me. I think he's sweet on
you, perhaps, and thinks he's doing you a sort of second-hand favor."

At times such as these all the old spirit that I had thought dead within
me would rise up in revolt against this creature who was taking, from
me my pride, my sense of honor, my friends. I never saw Von Gerhard now.
Peter had refused outright to go to him for treatment, saying that he
wasn't going to be poisoned by any cursed doctor, particularly not by
one who had wanted to run away with his wife before his very eyes.

Sometimes I wondered how long this could go on. I thought of the old
days with the Nirlangers; of Alma Pflugel's rose-encircled cottage;
of Bennie; of the Knapfs; of the good-natured, uncouth aborigines,
and their many kindnesses.