From my desk I could see Peter standing in the doorway of the news editor\'s room. I shut my eyes for a moment. Then I opened them again, quickly. No, it was not a dream. He was there, a slender, graceful, hateful figure, with the inevitable cigarette in his unsteady fingers—the expensive-looking, gold-tipped cigarette of the old days. Peter was Peter. Ten years had made little difference. There were queer little hollow places in his cheeks, and under the jaw-bone, and at the base of the head, and a flabby, parchment-like appearance about the skin. That was all that made him different from the Peter of the old days.
The thing had adjusted itself, as Norah had said it would. The situation that had filled me with loathing and terror the night of Peter\'s return had been transformed into quite a matter-of-fact and commonplace affair under Norah\'s deft management. And now I was back in harness again, and Peter was turning out brilliant political stuff at spasmodic intervals. He was not capable of any sustained effort. He never would be again; that was plain. He was growing restless and dissatisfied. He spoke of New York as though it were Valhalla. He said that he hadn\'t seen a pretty girl since he left Forty-second street. He laughed at Milwaukee\'s quaint German atmosphere. He sneered at our journalistic methods, and called the newspapers “country sheets,” and was forever talking of the World, and the Herald, and the Sun, until the men at the Press Club fought shy of him. Norah had found quiet and comfortable quarters for Peter in a boarding-house near the lake, and just a square or two distant from my own boarding-house. He hated it cordially, as only the luxury-loving can hate a boarding-house, and threatened to leave daily.
“Let\'s go back to the big town, Dawn, old girl,” he would say. “We\'re buried alive in this overgrown Dutch village. I came here in the first place on your account. Now it\'s up to you to get me out of it. Think of what New York means! Think of what I\'ve been! And I can write as well as ever.”
But I always shook my head. “We would not last a month in New York, Peter. New York has hurried on and left us behind. We\'re just two pieces of discard. We\'ll have to be content where we are.”
“Content! In this silly hole! You must be mad!” Then, with one of his unaccountable changes of tone and topic, “Dawn, let me have some money. I\'m strapped. If I had the time I\'d get out some magazine stuff. Anything to get a little extra coin. Tell me, how does that little sport you call Blackie happen to have so much ready cash? I\'ve never yet struck him for a loan that he hasn\'t obliged me. I think he\'s sweet on you, perhaps, and thinks he\'s doing you a sort of second-hand favor.”
At times such as these all the old spirit that I had thought dead within me would rise up in revolt against this creature who was taking, from me my pride, my sense of honor, my friends. I never saw Von Gerhard now. Peter had refused outright to go to him for treatment, saying that he wasn\'t going to be poisoned by any cursed doctor, particularly not by one who had wanted to run away with his wife before his very eyes.
Sometimes I wondered how long this could go on. I thought of the old days with the Nirlangers; of Alma Pflugel\'s rose-encircled cottage; of Bennie; of the Knapfs; of the good-natured, uncouth aborigines, and their many kindnesses. I saw these dear people rarely now. Frau Nirlanger\'s resignation to her unhappiness only made me rebel more keenly against my own.
If only Peter could become well and strong again, I told myself, bitterly. If it were not for those blue shadows under his eyes, and the shrunken muscles, and the withered skin, I could leave him to live his life as he saw fit. But he was as dependent as a child, and as capricious. What was the end to be? I asked myself. Where was it all leading me?
And then, in a fearful and wonderful manner, my question was answered.
There came to my desk one day an envelope bearing the letter-head of the publishing house to which I had sent my story. I balanced it for a moment in my fingers, woman-fashion, wondering, hoping, surmising.
“Of course they can\'t want it,” I told myself, in preparation for any disappointment that was in store for me. “They\'re sending it back. This is the letter that will tell me so.”
And then I opened it. The words jumped out at me from the typewritten page. I crushed the paper in my hands, and rushed into Blackie\'s little office as I had been used to doing in the old days. He was at his desk, pipe in mouth. I shook his shoulder and flourished the letter wildly, and did a crazy little dance about his chair.
“They want it! They like it! Not only that, they want another, as soon as I can get it out. Think of it!”
Blackie removed his pipe from between his teeth and wiped his lips with the back of his hand. “I\'m thinkin\',” he said. “Anything t\' oblige you. When you\'re through shovin\' that paper into my face would you mind explainin\' who wants what?”
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CHAPTER XVIII. PETER ORME
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CHAPTER XX. BLACKIE\'S VACATION COMES
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