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The Conflict by David Graham Phillips
page 42 of 399 (10%)
just off the library. It was filled up with the plain cheap
furniture and the chromos and mottoes which he and his wife had
bought when they first went to housekeeping--in their early days
of poverty and struggle. On the south wall was a crude and
cheap, but startlingly large enlargement of an old daguerreotype
of Letitia Hastings at twenty-four--the year after her marriage
and the year before the birth of the oldest child, Robert, called
Dock, now piling up a fortune as an insider in the Chicago
``brave'' game of wheat and pork, which it is absurd to call
gambling because gambling involves chance. To smoke the one
cigar the doctor allowed him, old Martin Hastings always seated
himself before this picture. He found it and his thoughts the
best company in the world, just as he had found her silent self
and her thoughts the best company in their twenty-one years of
married life. As he sat there, sometimes he thought of her--of
what they had been through together, of the various advances in
his fortune--how this one had been made near such and such
anniversary, and that one between two other anniversaries--and
what he had said to her and what she had said to him.
Again--perhaps oftener--he did not think of her directly, any
more than he had thought of her when they sat together evening
after evening, year in and year out, through those twenty-one
years of contented and prosperous life.

As Jane entered he, seated back to the door, said:

``About that there Dorn damage suit----''

Jane started, caught her breath. Really, it was uncanny, this
continual thrusting of Victor Dorn at her.
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