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“John!” she cried, “doesn’t it seem sinful to sail away in a ‘royal suite’ and leave this beautiful flat 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?”

But the younger brother laughed him to scorn.

“What’s your royal suite,” he mocked, “to our royal palace?”

An hour later, had the boarders listened outside the flat of the head clerk, they would have heard issuing from his bathroom the cooling murmur of running water and from his gramophone the jubilant notes of “Alexander’s Rag-time Band.”

When in his private office Carroll was making a present of the royal suite to the head clerk, in the main office Hastings, the junior partner, was addressing “Champ” Thorne, the bond clerk. He addressed him familiarly and affectionately as “Champ.” This was due partly to the fact that twenty-six years before Thorne had been christened Champneys and to the coincidence that he had captained the football eleven of one of the Big Three to the championship.

“Champ,” said Mr. Hastings, “last month, when you asked me to raise your salary, the reason I didn’t do it was not because you didn’t deserve it, but because I believed if we gave you a raise you’d immediately get married.”

The shoulders of the ex-football captain rose aggressively; he snorted with indignation.

“And why should I not get married?” he demanded. “You’re a fine one to talk! You’re the most offensively happy married man I ever met.”

“Perhaps I know I am happy better than you do,” reproved the junior partner; “but I know also that it takes money to support a wife.”