we're in--I'll tell you some time. You eat your eggs and toast;
you can't keep going on just coffee."

"I can't eat any eggs and toast," he objected, rising. "I
can't."

"Then wait till I can bring you something else."

"No," he said, irritably. "I won't do it! I don't want any dang
food! And look here"--he spoke sharply to stop her, as she went
toward the telephone--"I don't want any dang taxi, either! You
look after your mother when she wakes up. I got to be at WORK!"

And though she followed him to the front door, entreating, he
could not be stayed or hindered. He went through the quiet
morning streets at a rickety, rapid gait, swinging his old straw
hat in his hands, and whispering angrily to himself as he went.
His grizzled hair, not trimmed for a month, blew back from his
damp forehead in the warm breeze; his reddened eyes stared hard
at nothing from under blinking lids; and one side of his face
twitched startlingly from time to time;--children might have run
from him, or mocked him.

When he had come into that fallen quarter his industry had partly
revived and wholly made odorous, a negro woman, leaning upon her
whitewashed gate, gazed after him and chuckled for the benefit of
a gossiping friend in the next tiny yard. "Oh, good Satan!
Wha'ssa matter that ole glue man?"

"Who? Him?" the neighbour inquired. "What he do now?"