Page:O'Higgins--From the life.djvu/31

 enough for one meal for 10 cents—remnants, rather, but edible. He made a two-cent package of salt last him about three months, and he sprinkled 8 cents' worth of pepper over as long a period. On an average his meals cost him $2.03 a week. And, naturally, a restaurant looked like a robber's cave to him.

He had covered pages of his note-books with these calculations. It was not only impossible to overcharge him. It was equally impossible to give him underweight, because he knew the number of spoonfuls that ought to be in any pound of staple groceries, and he measured every pound when he got alone with it.

Having a mind of that quality, it is strange—isn't it?—that he ever became a romanticist.

He took the girl as far as his street door without much difficulty, but he had to support her up the steps, and it was plain that her legs were too weak to climb three flights of stairs. Her knees gave under her. He brought her to the first landing with an arm about her, practically carrying her, swaying and stumbling in the dark. There he dropped her hat in a corner and picked her up bodily. She made no sound. Although she was tall, she weighed little more than a toggle-jointed skeleton wrapped in soaked clothing. He judged that she had fainted.

He laid her on the floor of his landing until he