“That will be pleasant.” Frank again, carefree, aglow with neighbourly friendliness; even affection!
Mrs. Boyd had nothing more to say. She watched her son Tod start vigorously at his grape fruit, with a vivacity which seemed to indicate that he might finish with the rind. He drew his eggs energetically toward him, buttered a slice of toast, and finished his breakfast. Suddenly he looked at his watch.
“I have an extremely busy day before me,” he told her briskly. “I have Vedder Court this morning, some calls in the afternoon, and a mission meeting at four-thirty. I might probably be late for dinner,” and feeling to see if he had supplied himself with handkerchiefs, he kissed his mother, and was gone without another word about Gail! She could have shaken him in her disappointment. What was the matter with Tod?
The Reverend Smith Boyd sang as he went out of the door, not a tune or any set musical form, but a mere unconscious testing of his voice. It was quite unusual for him to sing on the way to Vedder Court, for he devoted his time to this portion of his duties because he was a Christian. He had sympathy, more than enough, and he both understood and pitied the people of Vedder Court, but, in spite of all his intense interest in the deplorable condition of humanity’s weak and helpless, he was compelled to confess to himself that he loathed dirt.
Vedder Court was particularly perfect in its specialty this morning. The oily black sediment on its pavements was streaked with iridescence, and grime seemed to be shedding from every point of the drunken old buildings, as if they had lain inebriated in a soaking rain all night, and had just staggered up, to drip. They even seemed to leer down at the Reverend Smith Boyd, as if his being the only clean thing in the street were an impertinence, which they would soon rectify. It had been comparatively dry in the brighter streets of New York, but here, in Vedder Court, there was perpetual moisture, which seemed to cling, and to stick, and to fasten its unwholesome scum permanently on everything. Never had the tangle of smudge-coated children seemed so squalid; never had the slatternly women seemed so unfeminine; never had the spineless looking men seemed so shuffling and furtive and sodden; never had the whole of the human fungi in Vedder Court seemed so unnecessary, and useless, and, the rector discovered in himself with startled contrition, so thoroughly not worth saving, body or soul!