“I have been told,” said Barbara, “that you are a great power in the East Side, a sort of overlord.”

“Even a beggar has flatterers.  They overrate me.”  The accompanying shrug of his great shoulders had an affectation of humility.  “Now, if I had a pair of legs—­but I haven’t.  And if I had I shouldn’t be an East-Sider.  For the maimed, the crippled, the diseased, it is pleasantest to be in residence on the East Side.  You have company.  You may forget your own misfortunes in contemplating the greater misfortunes of others.”

“Do you mind telling me,” she asked, “where you learned your English?”

“My father,” Blizzard explained, “was rather a distinguished man—­Massachusetts Institute of Technology man, University of Berlin, degree from Harvard and Oxford.  He had a prim way of putting things.  I suppose I caught it.”

The usual whine about better days was missing from the beggar’s voice.  If he seemed a little proud of his high beginnings, he did not seem in the least perturbed by the contemplation of his fallen estate.  Barbara was by now frankly interested, and proceeded with characteristic directness to ask questions.

“Is your father living?”

“No.  But it would hardly matter.  We became thoroughly incompatible after my accident.  He had very high ambitions for me, and a chronic disgust for anything abnormal—­such as little boys who had had their legs snipped off.  I didn’t like it either.  I suspect it made an unusually vicious child of me, a wicked, vengeful child.”

Blizzard’s candid expression implied that he had, however, soon seen the evil of his youthful ways, and turned over a whole volume of new leaves.

“What happened?” Barbara asked.

Blizzard laughed.  “I cannot be said to have run away,” he answered, “but I got away as best I could, and stayed away.  My father settled money upon me.  And that was the end of our relations.”

“And then,” said Barbara, “you, being young and foolish, lost your money.”

“Oh, no!” he exclaimed.  “I was a very bad little boy, but much too ambitious to be foolish.  And you know you can’t get very far in this world without money.”

“Still,” said Barbara, “a hand-organ and a tin cup?”

“A loiterer in the streets of New York,” the beggar explained, “picks up knowledge not to be had in any other way.  Knowledge is power.”

“Then you don’t have to beg, don’t have to pose, don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do?”

“Oh, yes, I do.  I have to crawl while others walk.  I have to wait and procrastinate, where another might rush in and dare.”

Again that first expression of Satan fallen overpowered the casual ease and even levity of his face.  But he shifted his eyes lest Barbara see into them and be frightened by that which smouldered in their stony depths.