Harvey J. O'Higgins

“ She has never emerged very far. She is too busy. She still acts as her husband's secretary, though a trio of silent Chinese have supplanted her as house-maid, valet, and cook. Carey has not emerged at all. He is, for one thing, too happy in his home. For another, he is—Owen Carey. He has taken refuge from all reality in his romantic art, and he devotes himself to it in the silence of a Trappist monk. ”

“ They were apparently as afraid of the rain as they were of poverty. And to Carey poverty was an old familiar, and the rain, as the poets say, caressed his face with a pleasant coolness. He was footsore, and the water in his shoes was even refreshing. He had fought against poverty once with a desperate fear of it, like a man drowning. ”

“ She is as silent as he, but she gives much more the impression of being a personage in her own right. She has a low-voiced air of grave young placidity, and she is slenderly graceful and well-dressed, with one of those Madonna-like faces that seem to show nothing of experience but its increment of wisdom. ”

“ He made a list of them, filled a note-book with them, and went back to the pastor. He and the reverend gentleman quarreled. Carey shook the pages of his indictment in the face of the horrified minister, and cried: "It wasn't a god! It was a devil!" He was put out on the pious door-step, sobbing, defiantly: "A devil! A devil!" The minister preached a sermon about him, in which no names were mentioned, but all his friends understood who was referred to, and they spread the secret. He was marked as an atheist. His home life became unbearable. ”

“ He laid her on the floor of his landing until he got his door open and his lamp lit. Then he carried her in and put her on his bed—a camp cot, without a mattress, for which he had paid fifty cents in a second-hand shop of the tenement quarter. It was covered with nothing but a pair of gray blankets, and he was not afraid of soiling them. Her head lay, dripping, on a pillow that had no pillow-case, and she looked as if she had been drowned. Her lips were white, but her face was a yellowish green. For a moment he was afraid that she had died in his arms. ”

“ Carey said. "I've been hoping he'd turn up. Go slow. If it's he—he'll follow us."
He took her arm, and she stumbled along with him, trembling against him, breathing heavily. The man, as Carey had hoped, came sneaking after them at a distance.
Carey took her up their steps to the front door, and descended with her, inside, to the basement, switching on all the lights. He left her in the kitchen and went out noiselessly to the basement door. The man was standing on the steps, looking up at the street number. Carey came quietly behind him. "She wants to see you," he said. ”

“ She seems born to be the successful wife of a successful author. And if his last novels have not been so successful as his earlier ones, it is, I think, because Mary Carey has become so interested in actualities that she is rather spoiled as an inspirer of the "literature of escape." ”

“ He gave her the cup of milk, and she looked up at him briefly, but her eyes told him nothing. She drank the milk as if her mouth demanded it but her mind was not interested in the matter.
"I don't live anywhere," she said, at last. ”

“ And Carey never wore anything but gray afterward.
He had the gruff manner with which so many men of diffidence protect themselves in strange approaches. He was much more keen for money in advance and steep royalties than was seemly in the author of Fair Anne Hathaway. He drove a good bargain, because the publishers were certain that they had found a best-seller. And they were right.
The book was an immediate success. Carey took thirty thousand dollars out of it in the first year, and he put the money by for her, in case anything should happen to him. ”

“ You told me you were hungry," he said. "You couldn't walk to a restaurant, so I brought you here. I guess you fainted."
She blinked at him in a bewildered daze. She demanded, "Why did you tie my feet?"
"Your feet?" he asked. "Oh! They aren't tied. I took off your shoes and stockings because they were wet, and wrapped your feet in a towel to warm them. Try some of this ham. It's generally pretty good."
He poured her a cup of milk and made her a sandwich of the ham and two slices of bread while he talked. "Don't you remember drinking a cup of milk and eating something?" ”

“ And if you have looked him up in Who's Who and the biographical dictionaries you know enough about him to be able to write the dates on his tombstone. But of the man himself it is safe to say that you know nothing. ”

“ He got his money from Chicago without any difficulty, and he found two rooms in a house on One Hundred and Tenth Street (going as far up-town as possible in order to take her away from the scene of her sufferings) , and he was able to rent the two rooms for fifteen dollars a month because they were almost uninhabitable. They were in the basement of a private house that had been converted into "studio apartments" by the owner, an eccentric woman of artistic tastes who proved, on nearer acquaintance, to be a "Peruna fiend." ”

“ Cornmeal, at two cents a pound, gave only four cups to the pound; oatmeal, at two and a half cents a pound, ran five cups to the pound; and hominy, at five cents a pound, four cups to the pound. (These, of course, were the prices of 1899.) He paid 30 cents a pound for coffee; there were 96 teaspoonfuls in a pound; and he used a teaspoonful to a cup of coffee—stingily. He paid 50 cents for a pound of tea, of 128 teaspoonfuls. He had figured out that granulated sugar cost him one- eighth of a cent for a spoonful. There were, usually. 240 potatoes in a bushel, and a cent's worth made a portion. ”