Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Silent Sam and other stories.djvu/56

44 them—until the first trial of acquaintance has been proven. Then, if the interest becomes serious, mutual confidences are naturally exchanged, the right to receive them having been established. It was for this reason that even after Larry and she had gone to the theaters together, sat in the parks, and patronized the museums of art and of natural history—which a thoughtful public has erected for the use of New York lovers who need sheltered benches on wet Sunday afternoons—he knew as little about her past, her parentage and the private circumstances of her life as she knew about his. She remained placid, uncoquettish and still reserved with the reserve of a woman whose voice was not made for chatter. That voice haunted him. He heard it even in the midst of the crashed metallic tinklings of the linoypes.

Then, one evening, when he called upon her by appointment to take her to the theater, she did not meet him at the door of the flat-house; and he ascended to the top floor apartment to find her with a headache and unwilling to go out. She was sharing the flat with two friends—one a head waitress in a dairy restaurant, the other a black-haired little Socialist who was trying to organize a union among the shop-girls of a department store where she worked. And it was here that Larry began to "see things diff'rent" (as he told his mother) in the matter of politics. Here, too, he got another impression of Miss McCarty, from the deference which her two room mates showed her and the air of right with which she accepted it—to say nothing of the graceful