her
he thought so, too, but he did not say he did not think so. He left it
quite to me, and I found another mathematical difficulty. There were
three nights' lodging to be paid for, and then he would have a dollar
and a quarter for food. I often spend as much as that on a single lunch,
including a quarter to the waiter, and I wouldn't have liked making it
pay for three days' board. But I didn't say so; I left the question
entirely to him, and he said nothing.

"In fact, he was engaged in searching himself for credentials, first in
one pocket, and then in another; but he found nothing better than a
pawn-ticket, which he offered me. 'What's this?' I asked. 'My overcoat,'
he said, and I noted that he had borrowed a dollar and a half on it. I
did not like that; it seemed to me that he was taking unfair advantage
of me, and I said, 'Oh, I think you can get along without your
overcoat.' I'm glad to think now that it hadn't begun to snow yet, and
that I had no prescience of the blizzard--what the papers fondly called
the Baby Blizzard (such a pretty fancy of theirs!)--which was to begin
the next afternoon, wasn't making the faintest threat from the moonlit
sky then. He said, 'It's rather cold,' but I ignored his position. At
the same time, I gave him a quarter."

"That was magnificent, but it was not political economy," we commented.
"You should have held to your irrefutable argument that he could get
along without his overcoat. You should have told him that he would not
need it on shipboard."

"Well, do you know," our friend said, "I really did tell him something
like that, and it didn't seem to convince him, though it made me
ashamed. I suppose I was thinking how he could keep close to the
reading-room fire, and I did not trouble to realize that he would not be
asked to draw up his chair when he came in from looking after the
cattle."

"It would have been an idle compliment, anyway," we said. "You can't
draw up the reading-room chairs on shipboard; they're riveted down."

"I remembered afterward. But still I was determined not to take his
overcoat out of pawn, and he must have seen it in my eye. He put back
his pawn-ticket, and did not try to produce any other credentials. I had
noticed that the ticket did not bear the surname we enjoyed in common; I
said to myself that the name of Smith, which it did bear, must be the
euphemism of many who didn't wish to identify themselves with their
poverty even to a pawnbroker. But