"Well," said Mr. Bullion, "perhaps they have suspended during the hard
times."

They tossed the ball back and forth with a lightness the Americans have,
and I could not have believed, if I had not known how hardened people
become to such things here, that they were almost in the actual presence
of hunger and cold. It was within five minutes' walk of their warmth and
surfeit; and if they had lifted the window and called, "Who goes there?"
the houselessness that prowls the night could have answered them from the
street below, "Despair!"

"I had an amusing experience," Mr. Twelvemough began, "when I was doing a
little visiting for the charities in our ward, the other winter."

"For the sake of the literary material?" the artist suggested.

"Partly for the sake of the literary material; you know we have to look
for our own everywhere. But we had a case of an old actor's son, who had
got out of all the places he had filled, on account of rheumatism, and
could not go to sea, or drive a truck, or even wrap gas-fixtures in paper
any more."

"A checkered employ," the banker mused aloud.

"It was not of a simultaneous nature," the novelist explained. "So he
came on the charities, and, as I knew the theatrical profession a little,
and how generous it was with all related to it, I said that I would
undertake to look after his case. You know the theory is that we get work
for our patients, or clients, or whatever they are, and I went to a