Page:The Dial (Volume 73).djvu/443

Rh Getting off the bed he dressed quickly and hurrying out of the room ran down a flight of stairs to the floor below. At the foot of the stairs he stopped. He felt suddenly old and weary and thought perhaps he had better not try to go back to the factory that afternoon. There was no need of his presence there. Everything was going all right. Natalie would attend to anything that came up.

"A fine business if I, a respectable business man with a wife and a grown daughter get myself involved in an affair with Natalie Swartz, the daughter of a man who when he was alive ran a low saloon and of that terrible old Irish woman who is the scandal of the town and who when she is drunk talks and yells so that the neighbours threaten to have her arrested and are only held back because they have sympathy for the daughters.

"The fact is that a man may work and work to make a decent place for himself and then by a foolish act all may be destroyed. I'll have to watch myself a little. I've been working too steadily. Perhaps I'd better take a vacation. I don't want to get into a mess," he thought. How glad he was that, although he had been in a state all day long, he had said nothing to any one that would betray his condition.

He stood with his hand on the railing of the stairs. At any rate he had been doing a lot of thinking for the last two or three hours. "I haven't been wasting my time."

A notion came. After-he married and when he had found out his wife was frightened and driven within herself by every outburst of passion and that as a result there was not much joy in making love to her he had formed a habit of going off on secret expeditions. It had been easy enough to get away. He told his wife he was going on a business trip. Then he went somewhere, to the city of Chicago usually. He did not go to one of the big hotels, but to some obscure place on a side street.

Night came and he set out to find himself a woman. Always he went through the same kind of rather silly performance. He was not given to drinking, but he now took several drinks. One might go at once to some house where women were to be had, but he really wanted something else. He spent hours wandering in the streets.

There was a dream. One vainly hoped to find, wandering about somewhere, a woman who by some miracle would love with freedom and abandon. Along through the streets one went usually in dark badly lighted places where there were factories and warehouses and