That was Jo—­a plump and lonely bachelor of fifty.  A plethoric, roving-eyed and kindly man, clutching vainly at the garments of a youth that had long slipped past him.  Jo Hertz, in one of those pinch-waist belted suits and a trench coat and a little green hat, walking up Michigan Avenue of a bright winter’s afternoon, trying to take the curb with a jaunty youthfulness against which every one of his fat-encased muscles rebelled, was a sight for mirth or pity, depending on one’s vision.

The gay-dog business was a late phase in the life of Jo Hertz.  He had been a quite different sort of canine.  The staid and harassed brother of three unwed and selfish sisters is an under dog.  The tale of how Jo Hertz came to be a Loop-hound should not be compressed within the limits of a short story.  It should be told as are the photo plays, with frequent throwbacks and many cut-ins.  To condense twenty-three years of a man’s life into some five or six thousand words requires a verbal economy amounting to parsimony.

At twenty-seven Jo had been the dutiful, hard-working son (in the wholesale harness business) of a widowed and gummidging mother, who called him Joey.  If you had looked close you would have seen that now and then a double wrinkle would appear between Jo’s eyes—­a wrinkle that had no business there at twenty-seven.  Then Jo’s mother died, leaving him handicapped by a death-bed promise, the three sisters and a three-story-and-basement house on Calumet Avenue.  Jo’s wrinkle became a fixture.

Death-bed promises should be broken as lightly as they are seriously made.  The dead have no right to lay their clammy fingers upon the living.

“Joey,” she had said, in her high, thin voice, “take care of the girls.”

“I will, Ma,” Jo had choked.

“Joey,” and the voice was weaker, “promise me you won’t marry till the girls are all provided for.”  Then as Joe had hesitated, appalled:  “Joey, it’s my dying wish.  Promise!”

“I promise, Ma,” he had said.

Whereupon his mother had died, comfortably, leaving him with a completely ruined life.

They were not bad-looking girls, and they had a certain style, too.  That is, Stell and Eva had.  Carrie, the middle one, taught school over on the West Side.  In those days it took her almost two hours each way.  She said the kind of costume she required should have been corrugated steel.  But all three knew what was being worn, and they wore it—­or fairly faithful copies of it.  Eva, the housekeeping sister, had a needle knack.  She could skim the State Street windows and come away with a mental photograph of every separate tuck, hem, yoke, and ribbon.  Heads of departments showed her the things they kept in drawers, and she went home and reproduced them with the aid of a two-dollar-a-day seamstress.  Stell, the youngest, was the beauty.  They called her Babe.  She wasn’t really a beauty, but some one had once told her that she looked like Janice Meredith (it was when that work of fiction was at the height of its popularity).  For years afterward, whenever she went to parties, she affected a single, fat curl over her right shoulder, with a rose stuck through it.