They went in through the railing that divided front and rear offices. Humphrey took off his coat and dropped into his swivel chair before the roll-top desk. Henry took off his and dropped on the kitchen chair before the littered pine table. Jim Smith, the foreman, came in, his bare arms elaborately tattooed, chewing tobacco, and told 'a new one,' sitting on the corner of Henry's table. Henry sat there, pale of face, toying with a pencil, and wincing. After Jim had gone, Henry sat still, gazing at the pencil, wondering weakly if the rough stuff of life was too much for him. He glanced over toward the desk. Humphrey, pipe in mouth, was already at work. Hump had the gift of instant concentration. Even this morning, after all that had happened, he was hard at it. Though he had something to work for. A sob was near. Henry had to close his eyes for a moment. His sensitive lips quivered. Humphrey would be, seeing his Mildred again at the close of the day. Henry found himself entertaining the possibility of crawling shamefacedly around to Corinne. Then he sat up stiffly. Felt in one pocket after another until he found a little red account-book. He hadn't made an entry for a week. Before Corinne came into his life he hadn't missed an entry for nearly two years. He sat staring at it, pencil in hand. His mouth set again. He wrote:-- 'Bkfst. Stanleys... 20c.' He slipped the book into his pocket; compressed his lips for an instant; then reached for a wad of copy paper. And gave a little sigh of relief. It was to be a long, perhaps an endless battle with self. But he had started. V--TIGER, TIGER! 1 |Miss Amelia Dittenhoefer was a figure in Sunbury. She had taught two generations of its young in the old Filbert Avenue school. And during more than ten years, since relinquishing that task, she had supplied the 'Society,' 'Church Doings,' 'Woman's Realm,' and 'Personal Mention' departments of the _Voice_ with their regular six to eight columns of news and gossip. And as several hundred Sunbury men and women had once been her boys and girls, this sort of personal news came to her from every side. Her 'children,' of whatever present age, accepted her as an institution, like the university building, General Grant, or Lake Michigan. She never had a desk in the _Voice_ office, but worked at home or moving briskly about the town. Home, to her, was the rather select, certainly high-priced boarding-house of Mrs Clark on Simpson Street, over by the lake, where she had lived, at this time, for twenty-one or twenty-two years. She was little, neat, precise, and doubtless (as I look back on those days) equipped for much more important work than any she ever found to do in Sunbury. But Woman's sun had hardly begun to rise then.