The Web of Life

ous eastern hospital. The nurses eyed him favorably. He was absolutely correct. When the surgeons reached the bed marked 8, Dr. Sommers paused. It was the case he had operated on the nig

as left blank to receive the statement of regimen, etc. A nurse was giving the patient an iced drink

fever and dissipation there showed traces of refinement. The soft hands and neat finger-nails, the carefully trimmed hair, were sufficient indications of a kind of luxury. The animalism of the man, however, had developed so early in life that it had obliterated all strong markings of character. The flaccid, rather

e the patient's temperature. "Only two degrees of fever," he commented mechanically; "that is very good. Has his wife-has any one been in to see him?" The head nurse, who sto

re, the man with the gun-shot wounds, will get well, I think; but I shouldn't wonder if mental complications followed. I have seen cases like that at the Bicetre,

alled-for expression of opinion was a new experience to him. In the Boston hospi

rned from the clerk that "No. 8" had been entered as, "Commercial traveller; shot three times in a saloon row." Mrs. Preston had called,-from her and the police this

his ken. While he was busy in getting away from the hospital, in packing up the few things left in his room, he thought no more about Preston's case or any case. But the last th

iages on the boulevard were standing in front of the fashionable garment shops that occupied the city end of the drive. He had an unusual, oppressive feeling of idleness; it was the first time since he had left the little Ohio college, where he had spent his undergraduate years, that he had known this emptiness of purpose. There was nothing

geness, of complete indifference. It hummed on, like a self-absorbed machine: all he had to do was not to get caught in it, involved, wrecked. For nearly a year he had been a part of it; and yet busy as he had been in the hos

rain clanged its way harshly across his path. As he looked up, he caught sight of the lake at the end of the street,-a narrow blue slab of water between two walls. The vista had a str

region of mephitic cloud, beneath which the husbands of those women were toiling, striving, creating. He walked on and on, enjoying his leisure, speculating idly about the people and the houses. At last, as he neared Fortieth Street, the carriages passed less frequently. He turned back with a little chill, a feeling that he had left the warm, living thing and was too much

last triumph in the delicate art of his profession had given him no exhilarating sense of power. He saw the woman's face, miserable and submissive, and he

*

ted by a careless person. Dresser had been occupying them lately. He had found Sam Dresser, whom he had kno

asked the big, blond young ma

wering, to stuff a pipe with tobac

five-under the roof in a big loft, tenth story-with a lot

letters from the ta

ome patients to live on, even

t-fed capitalists. They will see that you get something easy, and one of these days yo

btained work, thanks to a letter which Sommers had procured for him,-at his companion's rela

ck enough with the bloodsuckers to get you that letter from Hitchcock. O

d, his eye resting wistfully on a square

s answered. "Shall we

and regrets. A lust burned in them, as his companion could feel instinctively, a lus

the luxuries of evening attire. Dresser's glance shifted from face to face, from one trap to another, sucking in the glitter of the showy scene. The flashing procession on th

swag in the place