ace except what comes
from an oil stove on which sits a pan of steaming water. Behind the
stove with his twitching ear close against it a cat lies at all hours
of the day. There is an engaging smudge across his nose, as if he had
been led off on high adventure to the dusty corners behind the apple
barrel. I bend across the onion crate to pet him, and he stretches his
paws in and out rhythmically in complete contentment. He walks along
the counter with arched back and leans against our purchases.

Next our grocer is our bootblack, who has set up a sturdy but shabby
throne to catch the business off the "L." How majestically one sits
aloft here with outstretched toe, for all the world like the Pope
offering his saintly toe for a sinner's kiss. The robe pontifical, the
triple crown! Or, rather, is this not a secular throne, seized once in
a people's rising? Here is a use for whatever thrones are discarded
by this present war. Where the crowd is thickest at quitting
time--perhaps where the subway brawls below Fourteenth Street--there I
would set the German Kaiser's seat for the least of us to clamber on.

I took my shoes out of their wrapper. The cobbler is old and wrinkled
and so bent that one might think that Nature aimed to contrive a hoop
of him but had botched the full performance. He scratched my name upon
the soles and tossed them into the pile. There were big and little
shoes, some with low square heels and others with high thin heels as
if their wearers stood tiptoe with curiosity. It is a quality, they
say, that marks the sex. On the bench were bits of leather, hammers,
paring-knives, awls, utensils of every sort.

On arriving home I found an old friend awaiting me. B---- has been
engaged in a profitable business for fifteen years or so and he has
amassed a considerable fortune. Certainly he deserves it, for he has
been at it night and day and has sacrificed many things to it. He has
kept the straight road despite all truant beckoning. But his too close
application has cramped his soul. His organization and his profits,
his balance sheets and output have seemed to become the whole of him.

But for once I found that B---- was in no hurry and we talked more
intimately than in several years. I discovered soon that his hard
busyness was no more than a veneer and that his freer self still
lived, but in confinement. At least he felt the great lack in his
life, which had been given too much to the piling up of things,