flashed at him a glance of radiant amusement.
“The women may smile because they have pretty teeth, Sylvo.”
“You smile,” continued Sylvester cynically, “because you’re comfortably married and have two children. You imagine you’re happy, so you suppose everyone else is.”
Betty nodded.
“You may have hit it, Sylvo——” The chauffeur glanced around and she nodded at him. “Good-bye.”
Sylvo watched with a pang of envy which turned suddenly to exasperation as he saw she had turned and smiled at him once more. Then her car was out of sight in the traffic, and with a voluminous sigh he galvanized his cane into life and continued his stroll.
At the next corner he stopped in at a cigar store and there he ran into Waldron Crosby. Back in the days when Sylvester had been a prize pigeon in the eyes of debutantes he had also been a game partridge from the point of view of promoters. Crosby, then a young bond salesman, had given him much safe and sane advice and saved him many dollars. Sylvester liked Crosby as much as he could like anyone. Most people did like Crosby.
“Hello, you old bag of ‘nerves,’” cried Crosby genially, “come and have a big gloom-dispelling Corona.”
Sylvester regarded the cases anxiously. He knew he wasn’t going to like what he bought.
“Still out at Larchmont, Waldron?” he asked.
“Right-o.”
“How’s your wife?”
“Never better.”
“Well,” said Sylvester suspiciously, “you brokers always look as if you’re smiling at something up your sleeve. It must be a hilarious profession.”
Crosby considered.
“Well,” he admitted, “it varies—like the moon and the price of soft drinks—but it has its moments.”
“Waldron,” said Sylvester earnestly, “you’re a friend of mine—please do me the favor of not smiling when I leave you. It seems like a—like a mockery.”
A broad grin suffused Crosby’s countenance.
“Why, you crabbed old son-of-a-gun!”
But Sylvester with an irate grunt had turned on his heel and disappeared.
He strolled on. The sun finished its promenade and began calling in the few stray beams it had left among the westward streets. The Avenue darkened with black bees from the department stores; the traffic swelled into an interlaced jam; the busses were packed four deep like platforms above the thick crowd; but Sylvester, to whom the daily shift and change of the city was a matter only of sordid monotony, walked on, taking only quick sideward glances through his frowning spectacles.
He reached his hotel and was elevated to his four-room suite on the twelfth floor.
“If I dine downstairs,” he thought, “the orchestra will play either ‘Smile, Smile, Smile’ or ‘The Smiles that You Gave to Me.’ But then if I go to the Club I’ll meet all the cheerful people I know, and if I go somewhere else where there’s no music, I won’t get anything fit to eat.”
He decided to have dinner in his rooms.
An hour later, after disparaging some broth, a squab and a salad, he tossed fifty cents to the room waiter, and then held up his hand warningly.
“Just oblige me by not smiling when you say thanks?”
He was too late. The waiter had grinned.
“Now, will you please tell me,” asked Sylvester peevishly, “what on earth you have to smile about?”
The waiter considered. Not being a reader of the magazines he was not sure what was characteristic of waiters, yet he supposed something characteristic was expected of him.
“Well, Mister,” he answered, glancing at the ceiling with all the ingenuousness he could muster in his narrow, sallow countenance, “it’s just something my face does when it sees four bits comin’.”
Sylvester waved him away.
“Waiters are happy because they’ve never had anything better,” he thought. “They haven’t enough imagination to want anything.”
At nine o’clock from sheer boredom he sought his expressionless bed.
II
As Sylvester left the cigar store, Waldron Crosby followed him out, and turning off Fifth Avenue down a cross street entered a brokerage office. A plump man with nervous hands rose and hailed him.
“Hello, Waldron.”
“Hello, Potter—I just dropped in to hear the worst.”
The plump man frowned.
“We’ve just got the news,” he said.
“Well, what is it. Another drop?”
“Closed at seventy-eight. Sorry, old boy.”
“Whew!”
“Hit pretty hard?”
“Cleaned out!”
The plump man shook his head, indicating that life was too much for him, and turned away.
Crosby sat there for a moment without moving. Then he rose, walked into Potter’s private office and picked up the phone.
“Gi’me Larchmont 838.”
In a moment he had his connection.
“Mrs. Crosby there?”
A man’s voice answered him.
“Yes; this you, Crosby? This is Doctor Shipman.”
“Dr. Shipman?” Crosby’s voice showed sudden anxiety.
“Yes—I’ve been trying to reach you all afternoon. The situation’s changed and we expect the child tonight.”
“Tonight?”
“Yes. Everything’s O.K. But you’d better come right out.”
“I will. Good-bye.”
He hung up the receiver and started out the door, but paused as an idea struck him. He returned, and this time called a Manhattan number.
“Hello, Donny, this is Crosby.”
“Hello, there, old boy. You just caught me; I was going——”
“Say, Donny, I want a job right away, quick.”
“For whom?”
“For
