When
he had complimented her on the improvement in her voice she had fairly
hugged him for joy at his praise. He felt, too, the benign, tonic
medicament of the trained nurse, Spring, tripping softly adown the wards
of the convalescent city.
While Editor Westbrook was sauntering between the rows of park benches
(already filling with vagrants and the guardians of lawless childhood)
he felt his sleeve grasped and held. Suspecting that he was about to be
panhandled, he turned a cold and unprofitable face, and saw that his
captor was--Dawe--Shackleford Dawe, dingy, almost ragged, the genteel
scarcely visible in him through the deeper lines of the shabby.
While the editor is pulling himself out of his surprise, a flashlight
biography of Dawe is offered.
He was a fiction writer, and one of Westbrook's old acquaintances.
At one time they might have called each other old friends. Dawe had
some money in those days, and lived in a decent apartment house near
Westbrook's. The two families often went to theatres and dinners
together. Mrs. Dawe and Mrs. Westbrook became "dearest" friends.
Then one day a little tentacle of the octopus, just to amuse itself,
ingurgitated Dawe's capital, and he moved to the Gramercy Park
neighborhood where one, for a few groats per week, may sit upon one's
trunk under eight-branched chandeliers and opposite Carrara marble
mantels and watch the mice play upon the floor.
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