"You don't think he'd be the--the cheap kind it'd make a difference
with, of course."

"Oh, no; he isn't cheap. It won't make any difference with him."

Adams suffered a profound sigh to escape him. "Well--I'm glad of that,
anyway."

"The difference," she explained--"the difference was made without his
hearing anything about Walter. He doesn't know about THAT yet."

"Well, what does he know about?"

"Only," she said, "about me."

"What you mean by that, Alice?" he asked, helplessly.

"Never mind," she said. "It's nothing beside the real trouble we're
in--I'll tell you some time. You eat your eggs and toast; you can't keep
going on just coffee."

"I can't eat any eggs and toast," he objected, rising. "I can't."

"Then wait till I can bring you something else."

"No," he said, irritably. "I won't do it! I don't want any dang food!
And look here"--he spoke sharply to stop her, as she went toward the
telephone--"I don't want any dang taxi, either! You look after your
mother when she wakes up. I got to be at WORK!"

And though she followed him to the front door, entreating, he could not
be stayed or hindered. He went through the quiet morning streets at
a rickety, rapid gait, swinging his old straw hat in his hands, and
whispering angrily to himself as he went. His grizzled hair, not trimmed
for a month, blew back from his damp forehead in the warm breeze; his
reddened eyes stared hard at nothing from under blinking lids; and one
side of his face twitched startlingly from time to time;--children might
have run from him, or mocked him.

When he had come into that fallen quarter his industry had partly
revived and wholly made odorous, a negro woman, leaning upon her
whitewashed gate, gazed after him and chuckled for the benefit of a
gossiping friend in the next tiny yard. "Oh, good Satan! Wha'ssa matter
that ole glue man?"

"Who? Him?" the neighbour inquired. "What he do now?"

"Talkin' to his ole se'f!" the first explained, joyously. "Look like
gone distracted--ole glue man!"

Adams's legs had grown more uncertain with his hard walk, and he
stumbled heavily as he crossed the baked mud of his broad lot, but cared
little for that, was almost unaware of it, in fact. Thus his eyes saw
as little as his body felt, and so he failed to observe something that
would have given him additional light upon an old phrase that already
meant quite enough for him.

There are in the wide world people who have never learned