The Argosy, Vol. 81, No. 4 — page 73: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

FOUR SPEEDS FOR FOREST HILL. bought one and took me along when she was getting her demonstration, Other men are getting your Orton Cars on the market with decided success, Father has just got one of them. He tells me the busi- ness could have been developed without the addition of a cent of extra capital. I don’t blame you much for leaving Mrs. Polhemus. I wonder you stayed a week out. But there are more than a dozen agencies that you have given up in less than half a dozen years. If there were only one thing to which you had held on until you were at least put off— Oh, I can’t bear to think of it, to write of it. I know that some day I would lose respect for you. For you would be a failure. And that would be worse than this. And so I am giving up your ring, giving up—no, I can’t say yet that I am giving you up. I can’t quite give up the hope that you'll get hold of something and keep hold of it until your clever mind and hands begin to get results. And, if you ever do that, you'll not have to wait to earn a fortune;before you'll learn how little you’ve passed out of my life. Unless you are married to some other woman, you will have to refuse me yourself, for I shall certainly propose to you. For I am afraid I can’t learn not to love you as I have loved you ever since I first knew you. ARLENE. P. S. I am enclosing a check for the car you gave me. Can’t you use it to get started a little toward the things to which you'll stick P “She might have spared me the lecture,” Orton muttered. In his anger he wished to make known to her that he spurned the check. The ring might symbolize something which no longer existed, their plighted troth. The little-Six had been a present. He picked up the torn check, scrawled a few words across a sheet of note paper— “Tm not asking my presents back, thank you,” signed it, folded the check inside, stamped and addressed an envelope. He was not satisfied until he had taken it down to the post-office and mailed it. As he started from his room he snatched up the ring and took it with him. From the post-office he went to the jew- elry store. There was a little cheap hag- gling over the relic of his love. They gave him back a hundred dollars of what he had paid. He took the money to the Federal Trust Company’s bank and deposited it. So long had it been since he had deposited money there that the receiving teller asked him where he had spent the summer. Well, he thought, there would be no more 639 garage work while that lasted. And it should last him until he heard from some one of the places which had offered some hope of openings not too remote. The beer had heated his blood, and now that he had spent the force of his anger by doing all he could about it, he felt tired to the point of weakness. He dropped upon one of the benches in the park instead of continuing back to the boarding-house across it. “T tried to make it on high speed,” he thought bitterly. ‘And here I am.” Perhaps Military Park was, in what its benches stood for, about as far from Forest Hill as one could get in Newark. A hun- dred-yard walk in any one of a dozen of New York’s parks would show more typical down-and-outers than could be mustered in all Newark’s open spaces. The profession- ally unemployed are happily few in that town which, from being too near America’s first city, loses the glory of being the thir- teenth in point of population. But Military Park shows rather more of the derelict type than any of the others in the town. A bench in any park is a poor place for a man on the sunny side of the prime of life. In Orton’s mind sitting there that day was as distinctly emblematic of hopelessness, of shipwreck, of failure, as prison stripes are emblematic of crime. And— A man is very nearly a failure when he admits it to himself. But Orton had not acquired the habit of viewing failure with any genuine indif- ference or apathy. The bitterness of his thoughts soon became unbearable. The beer had not done the trick of dulling his feel- ings; it had added to his heat and made him thirstier than ever. Diagonally across from where he sat swung the doors of the Park Café. Before its bar he hesitated a moment later. had never regarded beer as a’ seriously harmful beverage, he had maintained a dif- ferent feeling for liquors. But the beer palled on him now. He had had more than enough of it. Then he shrugged his shoulders. He had tried, he had failed. He had none left to care about. He had nothing more to look forward to. A bitter little laugh barely sounded in his throat. He ran his eye across the shelfful of bottles until it recognized the label of a much advertised brand— (e) TOO If he (E@)