The Project Gutenberg eBook of Red and Black, by Grace S. Richmond This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook. Title: Red and Black Author: Grace S. Richmond Illustrator: Frances Rogers Release Date: August 1, 2021 [eBook #65971] Language: English Character set encoding: UTF-8 Produced by: D A Alexander, David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) *** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RED AND BLACK *** RED AND BLACK “‘So here’s to Dr. Redfield Pepper Burns, bearer of a heavier cross than I have ever borne, and winner of one more shining....’” RED AND BLACK By GRACE S. RICHMOND Author of “Mrs. Red Pepper,” “Red Pepper Burns,” “Red Pepper’s Patients,” “Twenty-Fourth of June,” Etc. WITH FRONTISPIECE BY FRANCES ROGERS A. L. BURT COMPANY Publishers New York Published by arrangement with Doubleday, Page & Company COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY THE CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY TO “MY BEST FRIENDS” CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. Across the Space 3 II. Headlines 17 III. No Anaesthetic 31 IV. Nobody to Say a Prayer 48 V. Plain as a Pikestaff 63 VI. High Lights 80 VII. Rather a Big Thing 99 VIII. Spendthrifts 117 IX. “Burn, Fire, Burn!” 134 X. A Shifting of Honours 153 XI. A Long April Night 174 XII. Everybody Plots 192 XIII. A Great Gash 212 XIV. Something to Remember 233 XV. Quicksilver in a Tube 255 XVI. The Altar of His Purpose 276 XVII. No Other Way 291 XVIII. At Four in the Morning 307 XIX. A Scarlet Feather 328 XX. A Happy Warrior 341 XXI. A Peal of Bells 354 XXII. In His Name 370 XXIII. The Town Was Empty Before 376 RED AND BLACK T RED AND BLACK CHAPTER I ACROSS THE SPACE HEIR first sight of each other—Red and Black—was across the space which stretches between pulpit and pew. It’s sometimes a wide space, and impassable; again, it’s not far, and the lines of communication are always open. In this case, neither of them knew, as yet, just what the distance was. Black—Robert McPherson Black—if you want his full name, had been a bit nervous in the vestry where he put on his gown. He had been preaching only five years, and that in a Southern country parish, when a visiting committee of impressive looking men had come to listen to him—had come again—and once more—and then had startled him with a call to the big suburban town and the fine old, ivy-grown church generally known as the “Stone Church.” “But, gentlemen,” he had said, swinging about quickly in his study chair when Mr. Lockhart, the chairman of the committee, had asked him if he would consider a call—“I’m—I’m—why, I’m not good enough for you!” The committee had smiled—it was quite a remarkable committee, and had a sense of humour. At least Samuel Lockhart had, and one other of the five who were waiting upon Mr. Black in his study after the evening service. “Meaning virtue—or ability?” inquired the chairman, with his friendly smile. “Both. You see—well, to put it honestly—I’m just a country boy as yet, born in Scotland and brought up in your South. I haven’t had the training——” “Very good things have come out of the country—and Scotland—and the South,” Mr. John Radway had suggested. “And I believe you are a graduate of—a perfectly satisfactory college and seminary, and have built this church up from desertion to popularity——” Well, they had had it out on those lines, and others, in the next hour, the committee falling more and more in love with its candidate—if so emotional a phrase may be used of the feelings stirred in the breasts of five middle-aged, steady-going, sensible men—as they watched the young man’s face go from pale to red and back again, and heard him tell them not only what he thought he was not, but what he thought they might not be either—in so frank and winning a way that the more he wasn’t sure he’d better come the surer they were he must! In the end he came—called and accepted, after the modern methods, wholly on the judgment of the committee, for he had refused absolutely and finally to come and preach a candidating sermon. So when he emerged from the vestry door, on that first May Sunday, he faced for the first time his newly acquired congregation, and the church faced for the first time its minister-elect. Which was wholly as it should be, and the result was a tremendously large audience, on tiptoe with interest and curiosity. Red was not in the congregation when Black first came in through the vestry door. Instead, as usual, he was racing along the road in a very muddy car, trying to make four calls in the time in which he should really have made two, because his wife had insisted very strenuously that he should do his best to get to church on that particular morning. It seemed that she had learned that the new minister was from the South, and she, being a Southerner, naturally felt an instant sense of loyalty. It was mighty seldom that Red could ever be got to church, not so much because he didn’t want to go—though he didn’t, really, unless the man he was to hear was exceptionally good—as because he couldn’t get around to it, not once in a blue moon—or a Sunday morning sun. And if, by strenuous exertion, he did arrive at church, there was one thing which almost invariably happened—so what was the use? The young usher for Doctor Burns’ aisle always grinned when he saw him come in, because he knew perfectly that within a very short time, he, the usher, would be tiptoeing down the aisle and whispering in the ear below the heavy thatch of close-cropped, fire-red hair. And then Doctor Burns’ attending church for that day would be over. The chances seemed fair, however, on this particular morning, because Red did not come into church till the preliminary service was well along. He stole in while the congregation was on its feet singing a hymn, so his entrance was not conspicuous; but Black saw him, just the same. Black had already seen every man in the congregation, though he had noted individually but few of the women. He saw this big figure, stalwart yet well set up; he saw the red head—he could hardly help that—it would be a landmark in any audience. He saw also the brilliant hazel eyes, the strong yet finely cut face. To put it in a word, as Redfield Pepper Burns came into the crowded church, his personality reached out ahead of him and struck the man in the pulpit a heavy blow over the heart. Too strong a phrase? Not a bit of it. If the thing has never happened to you, then you’re not a witness, and your testimony doesn’t count. But plenty of witnesses can be found. Robert Black looked down the aisle, and instantly coveted this man for a friend. “I’ve got to have you,” he said within himself, while the people went on singing the last stanza of a great hymn. “I’ve got to have you for a friend. I don’t know who else may be in this parish but as long as you’re here there’ll be something worth the very best I can do. I wonder if you’ll be easy to get. I—doubt it.” Now this was rather strange, for the family with whom he was staying while the manse was being put in order for the new minister had spoken warmly of Doctor Burns as the man whom they always employed, plainly showing their affection for him, and adding that half the town adored the red-headed person in question. When that red head came [3] [4] [5] [6] into church late, looking as professional as such a man can’t possibly help looking, it was easy enough for Black to guess that this was Doctor Burns. Across the space, then, they faced each other, these two, whose lives were to react so powerfully, each upon the other —and only one of them guessed it. To tell the truth, Red was more than a little weary that Sunday morning; he was not just then electrically sensitive, like the other man, to every impression—he was not that sort of man, anyhow. He had been up half the night, and his hair-trigger temper—which had inspired the nickname he had carried from boyhood— had gone off in a loud explosion within less than an hour before he appeared in the church. He was still inwardly seething slightly at the recollection, though outwardly he had returned to calm. Altogether, he was not precisely in a state of mind to gaze with favour upon the new man in the pulpit, who struck him at once as disappointingly young. He had been told by somebody that Robert McPherson Black was thirty-five, but his first swift glance convinced him that Robert had not been strictly truthful about his age—or else had encouraged an impression that anybody with half an eye could see was a wrong one. He was quite evidently a boy—a mere boy. Burns liked boys—but not in the pulpit, attempting to take charge of his life and tell him what to do. Therefore Red looked with an indifferent eye upon the tall figure standing to read the Scriptures, but acknowledged in his mind that the youth had a pleasing face and personality—Red liked black hair and eyes—he had married them, and had never ceased to prefer that colouring to any other. He admitted to himself that the intonations of Black’s voice were surprisingly deep and manly for such a boy—and then promptly closed his mind to further impressions, and ran his hand through his red hair and breathed a heavy sigh of fatigue. Vigorous fellow though he was at forty years, it was necessary for him to get an occasional night’s sleep to even things up. If it hadn’t been for his wife’s urging he might have been snatching forty winks this minute on a certain comfortable wide davenport at home. These Southerners—how they did hang together—and Black wasn’t a real Southerner, either, having spent his boyhood in Scotland. Red could have heard the new man quite as well next Sunday—or the one after. He glanced sidewise at his wife, and his irritation faded —as it always did at the mere sight of her. How lovely she was this morning, in her quiet church attire. Bless her heart —if she wanted him there he was glad he had come. And of course it was best for the children that they see their father in church now and then.... But he hoped the boy in the pulpit would not make too long a prayer—he, Red, was so deadly sleepy, he might go to sleep and disgrace Ellen. It wouldn’t be the first time. But he didn’t hear the prayer—and not because he went to sleep. It was during the offertory sung by the expensive quartette (which he didn’t like at all because he knew the tenor for a four-flusher and the contralto for a little blonde fool, who sometimes got him up in the night for her hysterics—though he admitted she could sing), that the young usher came tiptoeing down the aisle and whispered the customary message in the ear beneath the red thatch. Dr. Redfield Pepper Burns had been in church precisely eleven minutes this time before being called out. What in thunder was the use of his coming at all? He gave an I-told-you-so look at his wife as he got up and hung his overcoat on his arm and went up the aisle again, his competent shoulders followed by the disappointed gaze of Black from the pulpit. The doors closed behind him, and the young usher exhibited his watch triumphantly to another young usher, making signs as of one who had won a bet. Eleven minutes was the shortest time since February, when on a certain remembered Sunday Burns had never got to his seat at all, but had been followed down the aisle by the usher practically on a run. Somebody had got himself smashed up by a passing trolley almost outside the door of the sanctuary. Being an usher certainly had its compensations at times. Yes, Black was disappointed. Of course he faced a large and interested congregation, and everybody knows that a minister should not be more anxious to preach to one man than to another. Unfortunately, being quite human, he sometimes is. On this occasion, having suffered that blow over the heart before mentioned, he had found himself suddenly peculiarly eager to speak to the red-headed doctor—from the pulpit—and convince him that he himself was not as young as he looked—and that he could be a very good friend. Red looked to him like the sort of man who needed a friend, in spite of all Black’s hostess had said to him about Burns’ popularity and his enormous professional practice. During those eleven minutes, through part of which Black had been at leisure to glance several times at Red, he had received the distinct impression that he was looking at a much overworked man, who needed certain things rather badly—one of which was another man who was not just a good-fellow sort of friend, but one who understood at least a little of what life meant—and what it ought to mean. Thus thinking Black rose to make his prayer—the prayer before the sermon. His thoughts about Red had made him forget for a little that he was facing his new congregation—and that was a good thing, for it had taken away most of his nervousness. And after the prayer came the sermon—and after the sermon came a very wonderful strain of music which made Black lift his head toward the choir above him with a sense of deep gratitude that music existed and could help him in his task like that. At this time, of course, he didn’t know about the “four-flusher” tenor, and the little fool of a blonde contralto who always felt most like smiling at the moment when he was preaching most earnestly. When he did know—well—in the end there were two new members of that quartette. So this was how Black and Red met for the first time—yet did not meet. Though, after the seeing of Red across the as yet undetermined distance between pulpit and pew, there followed a thousand other impressions, and though after the service Black met any number of interesting looking men and women who shook his hand and gave him cordial welcome, the memory he carried away with him was that of R. P. Burns, M.D., as the man he must at any cost come to know intimately. As for Red—his impression was another story. “Well, how did the Kid acquit himself?” he inquired, when he met his family at the customary early afternoon Sunday [7] [8] [9] [10] dinner. There was quite a group about the table, for his wife’s sister, Martha Macauley, her husband, James Macauley, and their children were there. All these people had been present at the morning service. Macauley, ever first to reply to any question addressed to a company in general, spoke jeeringly, turning his round, good-humoured face toward his host: “Why not fee young Perkins to leave you in your pew for once, and hear for yourself? I’ve known you turn down plenty of calls when they took you away from home, but, come to think of it, I never knew you to refuse to cut and run from church!” Burns frowned. “You’re not such a devoted worshipper yourself, Jim, that you can act truant officer and get away with it. If you knew how I hated to move out of that pew this morning——” “Yes, you’d got all set for one of those head-up snoozes you take when the sermon bores you. Well, let me tell you, if you’d stayed, you wouldn’t have got any chance to sleep. He may be a kid—though he doesn’t look so much like one when you get close—lines in his face if you notice—he may be a kid, but he’s got the goods, and by George, he delivered ’em this morning all right. Sleep! I wasn’t over and above wide awake myself through the preliminaries, but I found myself sitting up with a jerk when he let go his first bolt.” “Bolt, eh?” Burns began to eat his soup with relish. As it happened he had had no time for breakfast, and this was his first meal of the day. “Jolly, this is good soup!” he said. “Well!—I thought they always spoke softly when they first came, and only fired up later. Didn’t he begin on the ‘Dear Brethren, I’m pleased to be with you’ line? I thought he looked rather conventional myself—and abominably young. I’m not fond of green salad.” “Green salad!” This was Martha Macauley, flushing and indignant. “Why, he’s a man, Red, and a very fine one, if I’m any judge. And he can preach—oh, how he can preach!” “I’m not asking any woman, Marty.” Burns gave his sister-in-law a cynical little smile. “Trust any woman to fall for a handsome young preacher with black eyes and a good voice, whatever he says. To be sure, Ellen——” “Oh, yes—you think Ellen is the only woman in the world with any sense. Well, let me tell you Len ‘fell for him,’ just as much as I did—only she never gives herself away, and probably won’t now, if you ask her.” Burns’ eyes met his wife’s. “Like him, eh, Len?” he asked. “Did the black eyes—and his being a Southerner—get you, too?” Mrs. Redfield Pepper Burns was an unusual woman. If she had not been, at this challenge, she would have answered one of two things. Either she would have said defiantly: “I certainly did like him—why shouldn’t I, when Jim did—and he’s a man! Why are you always prejudiced against ministers?” or she would have said softly: “If you had heard him, dear, I think you would have liked him yourself.” Instead she answered, as a man might—only she was not in the least like a man—“It’s hard to tell how one likes any minister at first sight. It’s not the first sermon, but the twentieth, that tells the story. And plenty of other things besides the preaching.” “But you certainly got a good first impression, Len?” Martha cried, at the same moment that James Macauley chuckled, “My, but that was a clever stall!” Mrs. Burns smiled at her husband, whose hazel eyes were studying her intently. Red never ceased to wonder at the way people didn’t succeed in cornering Ellen. She might find her way out with a smile alone, or with a flash of those wonderful black-lashed eyes of hers, but find her way out she always did. She found it now. “Mr. Lockhart told me confidentially this morning that Mr. Black said he wasn’t good enough for us. So at least we have been forewarned. He’ll have to prove himself against his own admission.” “Wasn’t good enough, eh?” growled Red Pepper, suddenly and characteristically striking fire. “Did he think we wanted a ‘good one’—a saint? I don’t, for one. My principal objection to him, without having heard him, is that he looks as if his mother parted his hair for him before he came, and put a clean handkerchief in his pocket. Jolly—I like ’em to look less like poets and more like red-blooded men! Not that I want ’em beefy, either. Speaking of beef—I’ll have another slice. This going to church takes it out of a fellow.” Jim Macauley howled. “Going to church! Coming away, you mean. Just a look-in, for yours. As to the way you like your preachers, my private opinion is you don’t like ’em at all.” “Mr. Black doesn’t look like a poet, Red.” It was Martha Macauley again. She and her brother-in-law seldom agreed upon any topic. “He has the jolliest twinkle in those black eyes—and his hair is so crisp with trying to curl that it doesn’t stay parted well at all—it was all rumpled up before the end of his sermon. And he has a fine, healthy colour—and the nicest smile——” Burns sighed. “Jim, suppose there was a man up for the governorship in our state, and we went around talking about his eyes and his hair and his smile! Oh, Christopher! Don’t you women ever think about a man’s brains?—what he has in his head—not on it?” “It was you who began to talk about his looks!” Mrs. Macauley pointed out triumphantly. “Check!” called James, her husband. “She scores, Red! You did begin a lot of pretty mean personal observations about his mother parting his hair, and so forth. Shame!—it wasn’t sporting of you. The preacher has brains, brother— brains, I tell you. I saw ’em myself, through his skull. And he’s got a pretty little muscle, too. When he gripped my hand [11] [12] [13] I felt the bones crack—and me a golf player. I don’t know where he got his—but he’s got it. These athletic parsons— look out for ’em. They’re liable to turn the other cheek, according to instructions in the Scriptures, and then hit you a crack with a good right arm. It struck me this chap hadn’t been sitting on cushions all his life. You’ll outweigh him by about fifty pounds, but I’ll bet he could down you in a wrestling match.” “Yes, and I’ll bet you’d like to see him do it,” murmured Red Pepper, becoming genial again under the influence of his second cup of very strong coffee, which was banishing his weariness like magic, as usual. “Well, you won’t right away, because we’re not likely to get to that stage of intimacy for some time. Ministers and doctors meet mostly in places where each has a good chance to criticize the other’s job. When I come to die I’d rather have my old friend, Max Buller, M.D., to say a prayer for me—if he knows how—than any preacher who ever came down the pike—except one, and that was a corking old bishop who was the best sport I ever met in my life. Oh, it isn’t that I don’t respect the profession—I do. But I want a minister to be a man as well, and I——” “But it isn’t quite fair to take it for granted that he isn’t one, is it, Red?” inquired the charming woman at the other side of the table who was his wife. James Macauley laughed. “Innocent of not being a man till he’s proved guilty, eh, Red?” he suggested. “You know I really have quite a strong suspicion that this particular minister is a regular fellow. The way he looked me in the eye— well—I may be no judge of men——” “You’re not,” declared his opponent, frankly. “Any chap with a cheerful grin and a plausible line of talk can put it all over you. You’re too good-natured to live. Now me—I’m a natural born cynic—I see too many faces with the mask off not to be. I——” “Yes, you! You’re the kind of cynic who’d sit up all night with a preacher or any other man you happened to hate, and save his life, and then floor him the first time you met him afterward by telling him you hadn’t any bill against him because you weren’t a vet’rinary and didn’t charge for treating donkeys.” “Call that a joke—or an insult?” growled Red Pepper; then laughed and switched the subject. But next Sunday he did not see fit to get to church at all, and on the following Sunday he couldn’t have done it if he’d tried, not having a minute to breathe in for himself while fighting like a fiend to keep the breath of life in a fellow-human. And between times he caught not a sight of Robert Black, who, however, caught several sights of him. R. P. Burns was in the habit of driving with his face straight ahead, to avoid bowing every other minute to his myriad acquaintances and patients. Though Black tried very hard more than once to catch his eye when passing him close by the curb, he had a view only of the clean-cut profile, the lips usually close set, the brows drawn over the intent eyes. For Red was accustomed to think out his operative cases while on the road, and when a man is mentally making incisions, tying arteries, and blocking out the shortest cut to a cure, he has little time to be recognizing passing citizens, not to mention a preacher whom he persists in considering too much of a “kid” for his taste, in the pulpit or out of it. But Black, as you have been told, was of Scottish blood, and a Scot bides his time. Black meant to know Red, and know him well. He was pretty sure that the way to know him was not to go and hang around his office, or to call upon his wife with Red sure to be away—as Black discovered he always was, in ordinary calling hours. He knew he couldn’t go and lay his hand on Red’s shoulder at a street corner and tell him he wanted to know him. In fact, neither these nor any other of the ordinary methods of bringing about an acquaintance with a man as a preliminary to a friendship seemed to him to promise well. The best he could do was to wait and watch an opportunity, and then—well—if he could somehow do something to help Red out in a crisis, or even to serve him in some really significant way without making any fuss about it, he felt that possibly the thing he desired might come about. Meanwhile—that blow over the heart which he had received at the first sight of the big red-headed doctor continued to make itself felt. Therefore, while Black went with a will at all the new duties of his large parish, and made friends right and left—particularly with his men, because he liked men and found it easier to get on with them than with women—he did not for a day relax his watch for the time when he should send a counter blow in under the guard which he somehow felt was up against him, or forget to plan to make it a telling one when he should deliver it. [14] [15] [16] “H CHAPTER II HEADLINES ARPS and voices!” ejaculated Robert Black, quite unconscious of the source of his poetic expletive, “how are my poor little two hundred and thirty-one books going to make any kind of a showing here?” Small wonder that he looked dismayed. He had just caught his first sight of the dignified manse study, with its long rows of empty black walnut bookcases stretching, five shelves high, across three sides of the large room. The manse, fortunately for a bachelor, was furnished as to the main necessities of living, but it wanted all the details which go to make a home. Though the study contained a massive black walnut desk and chair, a big leather armchair, a luxurious leather couch, and a very good and ecclesiastically sombre rug upon its floor, it seemed bare enough to a man who had lately left a warm little room of nondescript furnishing but most homelike atmosphere. To tell the truth, Black was feeling something resembling a touch of homesickness which seemed to centre in an old high-backed wooden rocking-chair cushioned with “Turkey red.” He was wondering if he might send for that homely old chair, and if he should, how it would look among these dignified surroundings. He didn’t care a picayune how it might look—he decided that he simply had to have it if he stayed. Which proved that it really was homesickness for his country parish which had attacked him that morning. Why not? Do you think him less of a man for that? “Oh, yours’ll go quite a way!” young Tom Lockhart assured him cheerfully. “And you can use the rest of the space for magazines and papers.” “Thanks!” replied Black, rather grimly grateful for this comforting suggestion. He and the twenty-year-old son of his hostess had become very good friends in the two days which had elapsed since Black’s arrival. He had an idea that Tom was going to be a distinct asset in the days to come. The young man’s fair hair and blue eyes were by no means indicative of softness—being counteracted by a pugnacious snub nose, a chin so positive that it might easily become a menace, and a grin which decidedly suggested impishness. “I’ll help unpack these, if you like.” Tom laid hold of the books with a will. Black, his coat off, set them up, thereby indisputably demonstrating that two hundred and thirty-one volumes, even though a round two dozen of them be bulky with learning, certainly do fill an inconceivably small space. “Well, anyhow,” he said, resting from his labours, and determinedly turning away from the embarrassing testimony of the bookshelves as to his resources, to the invitation of the massive desk to be equipped with the proper appliances to work, “a few pictures and things will help to make it look as if somebody lived here. I’ve several pretty good photographs and prints I thought I’d frame when I got here—I’ve been saving them up for some time.” He exhibited the collection with pride—they had lain across the top of the books. Tom Lockhart hung over them critically. “They’re bully!” was his judgment. “Not a bit what I’d have expected. Not a saint or a harp among ’em. Oh, gee!— that horse race is great! Where’d you get that? I mean—it’s foreign, isn’t it?” Black laughed. “That’s just a bit of a hurdle race we had in a little town down South. I’m on one of those horses.” “You are! Oh, yes—I see—on the front one! Why, say—” he turned to Black, enthusiasm lighting his face—“you’re one of those regular horse-riding Southerners. This is on your family estate, I’ll wager.” Black’s face flushed a little, but his eyes met the boy’s frankly. “I was born in Scotland, and came over here when I was sixteen. I worked for the man who lived in that house back there at the left. He let me ride his horses. I broke the black one for him—and rode him to a finish in that race. I was only seventeen then.” Tom stared for a minute before his manners came to the rescue. “That’s awfully interesting,” he said then, politely. Black could see the confusion and wonderment in his mind as plainly as if the boy had given expression to it. If the information had let Tom down a little, the next instant he rallied to the recognition that here was a man out of the ordinary. Tom was not a snob, but he had never before heard a minister own to “working” for anybody, and it had startled him slightly. But when he regarded Black, he saw a man who, while he looked as if he had never worked for anybody, had not hesitated to declare that he had. Tom thought he liked the combination. “If you could tell me of a good place to get these framed,” Black said, gathering up the photographs and prints as he spoke, “I believe I’ll have it done right away. It’s the one thing that’ll make this big house seem a little more like home.” “That’s right. And I can tell you a peach of a place—in fact I’ll take you there, if you want to go right now. It’s on our way back home. By the way—” young Tom glanced round the big bare room—“if there’s any stuff you want to get for the house to give it a kind of a jolly air, you know, you’ll find it right there, at Jane Ray’s. She can advise you, too.” “I don’t suppose I’ll get anything but the frames,” Black answered cautiously, as the two went out together. He had received an advance on his new salary, and therefore he had more money in his pocket than he had ever had before at one time, but he was too much in the habit of needing to count every penny to think of starting out to buy anything not strictly necessary. And already he knew Tom for the usual careless spender, the rich man’s son. Very likely, he thought, this place to which Tom was to take him was the most expensive place in the suburban town. On second thought, he decided to take along only two of his pictures—till he knew the prices he must pay. [17] [18] [19] [20]