difficulties by walking the
floor of nights. Philosophy never yet cured a toothache. Happily the
sufferer was now able to pay a dentist. Hence Banneker could work,
untroubled of her painful footsteps in the adjoining room, and
considered the outcome cheap at the price. He deemed himself an exponent
of enlightened selfishness. Perhaps he was. But the dim and worn
spinster would have given half a dozen of her best and painless teeth to
be of service to him. Now she came to his defense with a pretty dignity:

"I am sure that Mr. Banneker would not be out of place in any company."

"Maybe not," answered the cynical Lambert. "But where does he get it? I
ask you!"

"Wherever he gets it, no gentleman could be more forehanded in his
obligations," declared Mrs. Brashear.

"But what's he want to blow it for in a shirty place like Sherry's?"
marveled young Wickert.

"Wyncha ask him?" brutally demanded Hainer.

Wickert examined his mind hastily, and was fain to admit inwardly that
he had wanted to ask him, but somehow felt "skittish" about it.
Outwardly he retorted, being displeased at his own weakness, "Ask him
yourself."

Had any one questioned the subject of the discussion at Mrs. Brashear's
on this point, even if he were willing to reply to impertinent
interrogations (a high improbability of which even the hardy Wickert
seems to have had some timely premonition), he would perhaps have
explained the glorified routine of his day-off, by saying that he went
to Sherry's and the opening nights for the same reason that he prowled
about the water-front and ate in polyglot restaurants on obscure
street-corners east of Tompkins Square; to observe men and women and the
manner of their lives. It would not have been a sufficient answer;
Banneker must have admitted that to himself. Too much a man of the world
in many strata not to be adjustable to any of them, nevertheless he felt
more attuned to and at one with his environment amidst the suave
formalism of Sherry's than in the more uneasy and precarious elegancies
of an East-Side Tammany Association promenade and ball.

Some of the youngsters of The Ledger said that he was climbing.

He was not climbing. To climb one must be conscious of an ascent to be
surmounted. Banneker was serenely unaware of anything above him, in that
sense. Eminent psychiatrists were, about that time, working upon the
beginning of a theory of the soul, later to be imposed upon an
impressionable and faddi