Here at home with Norah there are no faces in the
crowds. There are no crowds. When you turn the corner
at Main street you are quite sure that you will see the
same people in the same places. You know that Mamie
Hayes will be flapping her duster just outside the door
of the jewelry store where she clerks. She gazes up and
down Main street as she flaps the cloth, her bright eyes
keeping a sharp watch for stray traveling men that may
chance to be passing. You know that there will be the
same lounging group of white-faced, vacant-eyed youths
outside the pool-room. Dr. Briggs's patient runabout
will be standing at his office doorway. Outside his
butcher shop Assemblyman Schenck will be holding forth on
the subject of county politics to a group of red-faced,
badly dressed, prosperous looking farmers and townsmen,
and as he talks the circle of brown tobacco juice which
surrounds the group closes in upon them, nearer and
nearer. And there, in a roomy chair in a corner of the
public library reference room, facing the big front
window, you will see Old Man Randall. His white hair
forms a halo above his pitiful drink-marred face. He was
to have been a great lawyer, was Old Man Randall. But on
the road to fame he met Drink, and she grasped his arm,
and led him down by-ways, and into crooked lanes, and
finally into ditches, and he never arrived at his goal.
There in that library window nook it is cool in summer,
and warm in winter. So he sits and dreams, holding an
open volume, unread, on his knees. Some times he writes,
hunched up in his corner, feverishly scribbling at
ridiculous plays, short stories, and novels