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Page 16

Peter followed Harmony as soon as he dared. Her door was closed,
and she was playing very softly, so as to disturb no one.
Defiantly, too, had he only known it, her small chin up and her
color high again; playing the "Humoresque," of all things, in the
hope, of course, that he would hear it and guess from her choice
the wild merriment of her mood. Peter rapped once or twice, but
obtained no answer, save that the "Humoresque" rose a bit higher;
and, Dr. Gates coming along the hall just then, he was forced to
light a cigarette to cover his pausing.

Dr. Gates, however, was not suspicious. She was a smallish woman
of forty or thereabout, with keen eyes behind glasses and a
masculine disregard of clothes, and she paused by Byrne to let
him help her into her ulster.

"New girl, eh?" she said, with a birdlike nod toward the door.
"Very gay, isn't she, to have just finished a supper like that!
Honestly, Peter, what are we going to do?"

"Growl and stay on, as we have for six months. There is better
food, but not for our terms."

Dr. Gates sighed, and picking a soft felt hat from the table put
it on with a single jerk down over her hair.

"Oh, darn money, anyhow!" she said. "Come and walk to the corner
with me. I have a lecture."

Peter promised to follow in a moment, and hurried back to his
room. There, on a page from one of his lecture notebooks, he
wrote--

"Are you ill? Or have I done anything?"

P. B."

This with great care he was pushing under Harmony's door when the
little Bulgarian came along and stopped, smiling. He said
nothing, nor did Peter, who rose and dusted his knees. The little
Bulgarian spoke no English and little German. Between them was
the wall of language. But higher than this barrier was the
understanding of their common sex. He held out his hand, still
smiling, and Peter, grinning sheepishly, took it. Then he
followed the woman doctor down the stairs.

To say that Peter Byrne was already in love with Harmony would be
absurd. She attracted him, as any beautiful and helpless girl
attracts an unattracted man. He was much more concerned, now that
he feared he had offended her, than he would have been without
this fillip to his interest. But even his concern did not prevent
his taking copious and intelligent notes at his lecture that
night, or interfere with his enjoyment of the Stein of beer with
which, after it was over, he washed down its involved German.

The engagement at Stewart's irked him somewhat. He did not
approve of Stewart exactly, not from any dislike of the man, but
from a lack of fineness in the man himself--an intangible thing
that seems to be a matter of that unfashionable essence, the
soul, as against the clay; of the thing contained, by an inverse
metonymy, for the container.

Boyer, a nerve man from Texas, met him on the street, and they
walked to Stewart's apartment together. The frosty air and the
rapid exercise combined to drive away Byrne's irritation; that,
and the recollection that it was Saturday night and that
to-morrow there would be no clinics, no lectures, no operations;
that the great shambles would be closed down and that priests
would read mass to convalescents in the chapels. He was whistling
as he walked along.

Boyer, a much older man, whose wife had come over with him,
stopped under a street light to consult his watch.

"Almost ten!" he said. "I hope you don't mind, Byrne; but I told
Jennie I was going to your pension. She detests Stewart."

"Oh, that's all right. She knows you're playing poker?"

"Yes. She doesn't object to poker. It's the other. You can't make
a good woman understand that sort of thing."

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Books | Photos | Paul Mutton | Thu 18th Dec 2025, 21:54

The Street of Seven Stars by Mary Roberts Rinehart