His spirits rose. "You're a right loving little thing when you wanna
be."
They laughed in duet; and before the plate-glass window of a furniture
emporium they paused to regard a monthly-payment display, designed to
represent the $49.50 completely furnished sitting-room, parlor,
and dining-room of the home felicitous--a golden-oak room, with an
incandescent fire glowing right merrily in the grate; a lamp redly
diffusing the light of home; a plaster-of-Paris Cupid shooting a dart
from the mantelpiece; and last, two figures of connubial bliss, smiling
and waxen, in rocking-chairs, their waxen infant, block-building on the
floor, completing the picture.
"Gee! it looks as snug as a bug in a rug! Looka what it says too: 'You
Get the Girl; We'll Do the Rest!' Some little advertisement, ain't it? I
got the girl all right--'ain't I, hon?"
"Aw!"
"Look at the papa--slippers and all! And the kid! Look at the kid,
Sweetness."
Her confusion nearly choked her and her rapid breath clouded the
window-glass. "Yeh, Charley! Looka the little kid! Ain't he cute?"
An Elevated train crashed over their heads, drowning out her words; but
her smile, which flickered like light over her face, persisted and her
arm crept back into his. At each shop window they lingered, but the glow
of the first one remained with her.
"Look, Sweetness--'Red Swag, the Train King! Performance going on now.'
Wanna go in?"
"Not to-night. Let's stay outside."
"Anything your little heart de-sires."
They bought hot chestnuts, city harbingers of autumn, from a vender, and
let fall the hulls as they walked. They drank strawberry ice-cream soda,
pink with foam. Her resuscitation was complete; his spirits did not
wane.
"I gotta like a queen pretty much not to get sore at a busted evening
like this. It's a good thing the ticket didn't cost me nothing."
"Ain't it, though?"
"Look! What's in there--a exhibit?"
They paused before a white-lighted store-front, and read, laboriously:
FREE TUBERCULOSIS EXHIBIT
TO EDUCATE THE PEOPLE HOW TO PREVENT CONSUMPTION
"Oh!" She dragged at his arm.
"Aw, come on, Sweetness; nothing but a lot of T.B.'s."
"Let's--let's go in. See, it's free. Looka! it's all lit up and all;
see, pictures and all."
"Say, ain't I enough of a dead one without dragging me in there? Free! I
bet they pinch you for something before you get out."
"Come on, Charley. I never did see a place like this."
"Aw, they're all over town."
He followed her in surlily enough and then, with a morbid interest,
round a room hung with photographs of victims in various emaciated
stages of the white plague.
"Oh! Oh! Ain't it awful? Ain't it awful? Read them symptoms. Almost with
nothing it--it begins. Night--sweats and losing weight and coughing,
and--oh--"
"Look! Little kids and all! Thin as matches."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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