Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Don-a-dreams.djvu/191

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THE IDEALIST
179

off, we'll have to buy blinds.") They shopped together in department stores and the "emporiums" of second-hand furniture, buying three camp-cots for $1.87 each, a dining-room table for $3.00, four kitchen chairs—"one for company"—at 75 cents each, cotton blankets, excelsior mattresses, cotton-batting comfortables, blue china dishes, knives and forks with wooden handles, kitchen utensils of tin, some hanging shelves for their library and a blank book for keeping accounts "on a basis of three." They celebrated their house-warming with a dinner of potatoes boiled in their "jackets," steak served in the pan in which it had been fried, fresh bread and a pat of butter in the grocer's wooden dish. They ate from a spread of newspapers in lieu of a tablecloth. And they laughed so heartily at Pittsey's foolery that he had to warn them to be careful. ("Don't raise the roof. More of that ceiling will be coming down on us.")

It was not until Conroy lit his pipe that the subject in the background of all their thoughts was brought out into the conversation. "Well," he said, "to-morrow we start to look for work. What are you going to do, Pitt?"

"Me? I'm going to start a newspaper article for a Saturday 'supplement' on Camping Out in New York City. How about you?"

Conroy reddened. "I think I know enough about the governor's business to be able to get something all right. What are you going to do, Don?"

Don answered truthfully: "I don't know. I haven't decided yet."

The fact of the matter was that his knowledge