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For one moment Romarin stood; the next, he had turned and run for his life. At the corner of the street he collided with a loafer, and only the wall saved them from going down. Feverishly Romarin plunged his hand into his pocket and brought out a handful of silver. He crammed it into the loafer's hand. "Here quick take it!" he gasped.
She could remember when he was the darling and pride of the family especially of his father. How had it happened? He had said to her once, "There must have been a black drop somewhere in our forbears, Edie. It has reappeared in me. We are none of us responsible, my dear, for our precious selves. I may be a sinner and a loafer but that benevolent Almighty of yours made me."
But Jim was long and thin and bent at the waist from stooping over pool-tables, and he was what might have been known in the indiscriminating North as a corner loafer. "Jelly-bean" is the name throughout the undissolved Confederacy for one who spends his life conjugating the verb to idle in the first person singular I am idling, I have idled, I will idle.
"You are not a sceptic, nor a pessimist, nor a Voltairean, you are a loafer, and you are a vicious loafer, a conscious loafer, not a simple loafer.
In this he miscalculated; for Bertha, youthful as she seemed, was accustomed, as she would say, to "standing off mashers," and her impassive face and keen, steady eyes fairly disconcerted the libertine. "For Mart's sake, we'll put up with him," she said to her mother. "He's a loafer; but I can see the Captain kind o' likes to have him around for old times' sake, I reckon." This was true.
In an hour, at the most, Dorothy would be her sunny self again, penitent, and wholly ashamed of her undignified outburst. By to-morrow she would have forgotten it, but Harlan, made of sterner clay, would remember it for days. "Loafer!" The cruel word seemed written accusingly on every wall of the room. In a sudden flash of insight he perceived the truth of it and it hurt.
The doings of every scapegrace in an American university, of every silly woman in Chicago, of every blackguard in New York, of every snob at Newport, of every desperado in the Rocky Mountains, of every club loafer anywhere, were served up as typical examples of American life.
Outside it had begun to rain, and Joe Grant, a loafer by trade and a lug-biter by circumstance, shifted from one foot to another, and stared dismally at the narrow slit between the swinging doors of the "Angel", where he knew there was warmth, and light, and comfort everything that he desired.
"Does he know you, do you think? I happened to see him coming along the street, and as soon as he saw us he stood stock-still. He has been gazing up here now for the past two or three minutes." "I've booted a rare lot of I-talians in my time," said Stump. "I wouldn't be a bit surprised if he was some loafer I'd helped across a ship's gangway at Genoa or Naples."
And he thought of Captain Peek, Katie's father, a man he dreaded and abhorred; a genteel loafer and spendthrift, battening upon the labour of his women-folk; a very queer fish, and, according to repute, not of the freshest. The night had turned chill and foggy. The heart of the town, with its noises, was left behind.
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