are asking her," Kleiman said as he came out of
his office to confront Max. "You are acting altogether too fresh around
here, Kirschner. Do you pay rent here _oder_ what?"

Max made no reply.

"And furthermore," Kleiman continued, "we got business to attend to
here, Kirschner, and we couldn't afford to have no dead ones hanging
around."

For a brief interval he scowled at Max, who turned on his heel and made
for the elevator without another word. His applications for employment
during the past few days had met with polite refusals coupled with
cheerful prophecies of his early employment. To be sure, Max had taken
little stock in this consoling optimism, but it had all helped to keep
alive his spirits, which had sunk again to their lowest ebb at
Kleiman's epithet, "dead one."

After all, he was a dead one, he reflected as he stumbled along the
sidewalk toward his boarding house on Irving Place. A man of sixty
safely intrenched in his own business, with the confidence his wealth
inspires, is in the very prime of life. But Max, with his health
impaired and his employment taken away from him, felt and looked a
decrepit old man as he tottered upstairs to his third-floor room and
flung himself on the bed, where he lay for more than an hour staring at
the ceiling.

During that interval he reviewed his career from the time he helped his
father, a Prussian refugee of 1848, in the little country store upstate.
Then came his father's death, followed by a clerkship in the large
dry-goods business of his father's competitors. After this he had moved
to New York; and from that time on he had followed the calling of a
travelling salesman with varying success, until at sixty he found
himself out of health and employment, with property of less than two
thousand dollars as a reserve fund.

What a fool he had been not to accept Perlmutter's offer! Nevertheless
it seemed futile for a man of sixty to make a new start in a strange
town, especially since, in rural communities, business goes as much by
favour and friendship as by commercial enterprise. Now, had he been
offered a partnership in a store in his native town, where it would be
an easy matter to renew old acquaintance, he might have viewed the
proposition differently.

He rose from the bed and sat down in an armchair, while his mind
reverted to more pleasant topics. He pictured to himself his father's
store underneath what the townspeople called the opera house. He saw
aga