City and town life -- Fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction
“I'm going to get up to Harlem all the same,” he said. “The 'L' will be
just as jammed, but there'll be a place somewhere, and I'll get it.”
His clothes were the outwardly decent ones of a young man who
must perforce seek cheap clothing-stores, and to whom a ten-dollar
“hand-me-down” is a source of exultant rejoicing. With the aid of great
care and a straight, well-formed young body, he managed to make the
best of them; but they were not to be counted upon for warmth even in
ordinarily cold weather. His overcoat was a specious covering, and was
not infrequently odorous of naphtha.
“You've got to know something about first aid to the wounded if you live
on ten per,” he had said once to Little Ann. “A suit of clothes gets to
be an emergency-case mighty often if it lasts three years.”
“Going up to Harlem to-day, T. T.?” his neighbor at table asked him as
he sat down to breakfast.
“Right there,” he answered. “I've ordered the limousine round, with the
foot-warmer and fur rugs.”
“I guess a day wouldn't really matter much,” said Mrs. Bowse,
good-naturedly. “Perhaps it might be better to-morrow.”
“And perhaps it mightn't,” said Tembarom, eating “break-fast-food” with
a cheerful appetite. “What you can't be stone-cold sure of to-morrow you
drive a nail in to-day.”
He ate a tremendous breakfast as a discreet precautionary measure.
The dark dining-room was warm, and the food was substantial. It was
comfortable in its way.
“You'd better hold the hall door pretty tight when you go out, and don't
open it far,” said Mrs. Bowse as he got up to go. “There's wind enough
to upset things.”
Tembarom went out in the hall, and put on his insufficient overcoat. He
buttoned it across his chest, and turned its collar up to his ears. Then
he bent down to turn up the bottoms of his trousers.
“A pair of arctics would be all to the merry right here,” he said,
and then he stood upright and saw Little Ann coming down the staircase
holding in her hand a particularly ugly tar-tan-plaid woolen neck-scarf
of the kind known in England as a “comforter.”
“If you are going out in this kind of weather,” she said in her serene,
decided little voice, “you'd better wrap this comforter right round your
neck, Mr. Tembarom. It's one of Father's, and he can spare it because
he's got another, and, besides, he's not going out.”
Tembarom took it with a sudden emotional perception of the fact that he
was being taken care of in an abnormally luxurious manner.
“Now, I appreciate that,” he said. “The thing about you. Little Ann, is
that you never make a wrong guess about what a fellow needs, do you?”
“I'm too used to taking care of Father not to see things,” she answered.
“What you get on to is how to take care of the whole world--initials
on a fellow's socks and mufflers round his neck.” His eyes looked
remarkably bright.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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