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So, then. The California trip never materialized. And the year that followed never was quite clear in old man Minick’s dazed mind. In the first place, it was the year in which stocks tumbled and broke their backs. Gilt-edged securities showed themselves to be tinsel. Old man Minick had retired from active business just one year before, meaning to live comfortably on the fruit of a half-century’s toil. He now saw that fruit rotting all about him. There was in it hardly enough nourishment to sustain them. Then came the day when Ma Minick went downtown to see Matthews about that pain right here and came home looking shrivelled, talking shrilly about nothing, and evading Pa’s eyes. Followed months that were just a jumble of agony, X-rays, hope, despair, morphia, nothingness.

After it was all over: “But I was going first,” old man Minick said, dazedly.

The old house on Ellis near Thirty-ninth was sold for what it would bring. George, who knew Chicago real-estate if any one did, said they might as well get what they could. Things would only go lower. You’ll see. And nobody’s going to have any money for years. Besides, look at the neighbourhood!

Old man Minick said George was right. He said everybody was right. You would hardly have recognized in this shrunken figure and wattled face the spruce and dressy old man whom Ma Minick used to spoil so delightfully. “You know best, George. You know best.” He who used to stand up to George until Ma Minick was moved to say, “Now, Pa, you don’t know everything.”

After Matthews’ bills, and the hospital, and the nurses and the medicines and the thousand and one things were paid there was left exactly five hundred dollars a year.

“You’re going to make your home with us, Father,” George and Nettie said. Alma, too, said this would be the best. Alma, the married daughter, lived in Seattle. “Though you know Ferd and I would be only too glad to have you.”

Seattle! The ends of the earth. Oh, no. No! he protested, every fibre of his old frame clinging to the accustomed. Seattle, at seventy! He turned piteous eyes on his son George and his daughter-in-law Nettie. “You’re going to make your home with us, Father,” they reassured him. He clung to them gratefully. After it was over Alma went home to her husband and their children.

So now he lived with George and Nettie in the five-room flat on South Park Avenue, just across from Washington Park. And there was no extra pillow on the floor.

Nettie hadn’t said he couldn’t have the extra pillow. He had told her he used two and she had given him two the first week. But every morning she had found a pillow cast on the floor.

“I thought you used two pillows, Father.”

“I do.”

“But there’s always one on the floor when I make the bed in the morning. You always throw one on the floor. You only sleep on one pillow, really.”

“I use two pillows.”

But the second week there was one pillow. He tossed and turned a good deal there in his bedroom off the kitchen. But he got used to it in time. Not used to it, exactly, but–well—-

The bedroom off the kitchen wasn’t as menial as it sounds. It was really rather cosy. The five-room flat held living room, front bedroom, dining room, kitchen, and maid’s room. The room off the kitchen was intended as a maid’s room but Nettie had no maid. George’s business had suffered with the rest. George and Nettie had said, “I wish there was a front room for you, Father. You could have ours and we’d move back here, only this room’s too small for twin beds and the dressing table and the chiffonier.” They had meant it–or meant to mean it.

“This is fine,” old man Minick had said. “This is good enough for anybody.” There was a narrow white enamel bed and a tiny dresser and a table. Nettie had made gay cretonne covers and spreads and put a little reading lamp on the table and arranged his things. Ma Minick’s picture on the dresser with her mouth sort of pursed to make it look small. It wasn’t a recent picture. Nettie and George had had it framed for him as a surprise. They had often urged her to have a picture taken, but she had dreaded it. Old man Minick didn’t think much of that photograph, though he never said so. He needed no photograph of Ma Minick. He had a dozen of them; a gallery of them; thousands of them. Lying on his one pillow he could take them out and look at them one by one as they passed in review, smiling, serious, chiding, praising, there in the dark. He needed no picture on his dresser.