“Mrs. Benson congratulated me warmly on my advancement. She has been very thoughtful of my comforts for the last seven years, going on eight. She mentioned how she had always tried to, and I thanked her deeply. She said she hoped I wouldn’t feel impelled to move elsewhere, and I assured her I had no such intentions. I despise a man who is puffed up by a little success. Vanity of vanities, _vanitas vanitatis_. Or _vanitatium_? I wish I remembered more of my Latin; my memory is far from what I should like it to be. Mrs. B. also said she had two tickets to The Empire Vaudeville given her by the new couple in the back parlor. They are in the theatrical profession, and are getting a try-out there this week. I could not well refuse her invitation to accompany her, although I do not care for vaudeville. She says she goes at least once every week. It brightens up her dull life. Poor soul! I guess she needs it. Hers is not a very gay life.”
[Illustration: Drawn by Herman Pfeifer. Half-tone plate engraved by H. C. Merrill
“‘SHE WAS THREE AISLES AWAY, LOOKING OVER THAT NEW IMPORTATION OF CHINESE MANDARINS’”]
During the considerable period that Mr. Francis had rented Mrs. Benson’s most expensive room, the second-floor front, his intimacy with her had consisted of one heart-to-heart talk in the week following Mr. Benson’s decease. Mr. Benson, who had been indefinitely “in the clothing business,” had caught a cold which developed into pneumonia, with fatal results. When, a few days after the funeral, Mrs. Benson wept on Mr. Francis’s shoulder, she had said that she wished never to speak to another man, never even to see one, except in the necessary course of business. She ran a boarding-house, and she would accept men as well as women for boarders; other relations with them she could not consider.
Mr. Francis had always respected her wishes. Even when she presided at the Sunday evening dinner-table, a wide, tight vision of black silk, and conversation was supposed to be more unrestricted than on week-days, Mr. Francis had been careful not to trespass on the sacred confines of her bereavement. Her conversation with the other men at the table, in which she attempted to include him, he passed off as her necessary sacrifice to the business that supported her widowhood. He was even more literal-minded than the average idealist.