t empty?"

Over the telephone John was having trouble with the drug clerk.

"No!" he explained, "I'm not seasick _now_. The medicine I want is to be
taken later. I _know_ I'm speaking from the Pavonia; but the Pavonia
isn't a ship; it's an apartment-house."

He turned to Millie. "We can't be in two places at the same time," he
suggested.

"But, think," insisted Millie, "of all the poor people stifling to-night
in this heat, trying to sleep on the roofs and fire-escapes; and our
flat so cool and big and pretty--and no one in it."

John nodded his head proudly.

"I know it's big," he said, "but it isn't big enough to hold all the
people who are sleeping to-night on the roofs and in the 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?"