much. The houses looked so incapable of producing the big sums of money that Lawyer Oldport kept piling up in banks for him to spend.
In the evening Blinker went to one of his clubs, intending to dine. Nobody was there except some old fogies playing whist who spoke to him with grave politeness and glared at him with savage contempt. Everybody was out of town. But here he was kept in like a schoolboy to write his name over and over on pieces of paper. His wounds were deep.
Blinker turned his back on the fogies, and said to the club steward who had come forward with some nonsense about cold fresh salmon roe:
“Symons, I’m going to Coney Island.” He said it as one might say: “All’s off; I’m going to jump into the river.”
The joke pleased Symons. He laughed within a sixteenth of a note of the audibility permitted by the laws governing employees.
“Certainly, sir,” he tittered. “Of course, sir, I think I can see you at Coney, Mr. Blinker.”
Blinker got a paper and looked up the movements of Sunday steamboats. Then he found a cab at the first corner and drove to a North River pier. He stood in line, as democratic as you or I, and bought a ticket, and was trampled upon and shoved forward until, at last, he found himself on the upper deck of the boat staring brazenly at a girl who sat alone upon
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