parks."

"I was thinking of your brother--and Grace," said Millie. "They've been
married only two weeks now, and they're in a stuffy hall bedroom and
eating with all the other boarders. Think what our flat would mean to
them; to be by themselves, with eight rooms and their own kitchen and
bath, and our new refrigerator and the gramophone! It would be Heaven!
It would be a real honeymoon!"

Abandoning the drug clerk, John lifted Millie in his arms and kissed
her, for next to his wife nearest his heart was the younger brother.

* * * * *

The younger brother and Grace were sitting on the stoop of the
boarding-house. On the upper steps, in their shirt-sleeves, were the
other boarders; so the bride and bridegroom spoke in whispers. The air
of the cross street was stale and stagnant; from it rose exhalations of
rotting fruit, the gases of an open subway, the smoke of passing
taxicabs. But between the street and the hall bedroom, with its odors of
a gas-stove and a kitchen, the choice was difficult.

"We've got to cool off somehow," the young husband was saying, "or you
won't sleep. Shall we treat ourselves to ice-cream sodas or a trip on
the Weehawken ferry-boat?"

"The ferry-boat!" begged the girl, "where we can get away from all these
people."

A taxicab with a trunk in front whirled into the street, kicked itself
to a stop, and the head clerk and Millie spilled out upon the pavement.
They talked so fast, and the younger brother and Grace talked so fast,
that the boarders, although they listened intently, could make nothing
of it.

They distinguished only the concluding sentences:

"Why don't you drive down to the wharf with us," they heard the elder
brother ask, "and see our royal suite?"

But the younger brother laughed him to scorn.

"What's your royal suite," he mocked, "to our royal palace?"

An hour later, had the boarders listened outside the flat of the head
clerk, they would have heard issuing from his bathroom the cooling
murmur of running water and from his gramophone the jubilant notes of
"Alexander's Ragtime Band."

When in his private office Carroll was making a present of the royal
suite to the head clerk, in the main office Hastings, the junior
partner, was addressing "Champ" Thorne, the bond clerk. He addressed him
familiarly and affectionately as "Champ." This was due partly to the
fact that twenty-six years before Thorne had been christened Cham