would be: as easy as to turn back now and tell that old fool's girl that
he loved her, and rake in half his millions. Why should not he do that?
No one else cared for him; and at a year's end, probably, one woman would
be like another as far as the love was concerned, and probably he should
not be more tired if the woman were Christine Dryfoos than if she were
Margaret Vance. He kept Alma Leighton out of the question, because at the
bottom of his heart he believed that she must be forever unlike every
other woman to him.

The tide of his confused and aimless reverie had carried him far
down-town, he thought; but when he looked up from it to see where he was
he found himself on Sixth Avenue, only a little below Thirty-ninth
Street, very hot and blown; that idiotic fur overcoat was stifling. He
could not possibly walk down to Eleventh; he did not want to walk even to
the Elevated station at Thirty-fourth; he stopped at the corner to wait
for a surface-car, and fell again into his bitter fancies. After a while
he roused himself and looked up the track, but there was no car coming.
He found himself beside a policeman, who was lazily swinging his club by
its thong from his wrist.

"When do you suppose a car will be along?" he asked, rather in a general
sarcasm of the absence of the cars than in any special belief that the
policeman could tell him.

The policeman waited to discharge his tobacco-juice into the gutter. "In
about a week," he said, nonchalantly.

"What's the matter?" asked Beaton, wondering what the joke could be.

"Strike," said the policeman. His interest in Beaton's ignorance seemed