They came home late, fagged and irritable, and supplemented their hurried dinner with hastily bought and so-called food from the near-by delicatessen.

Thus ran the life of ease for Ben Westerveld, retired farmer.  And so we find him lying impatiently in bed, rubbing a nervous forefinger over the edge of the sheet and saying to himself that, well, here was another day.  What day was it?  Le’see now.  Yesterday was—­yesterday—­a little feeling of panic came over him.  He couldn’t remember what yesterday had been.  He counted back laboriously and decided that to-day must be Thursday.  Not that it made any difference.

* * * * *

They had lived in the city almost a year now.  But the city had not digested Ben.  He was a leathery morsel that could not be assimilated.  There he stuck in Chicago’s crop, contributing nothing, gaining nothing.  A rube in a comic collar ambling aimlessly about Halsted Street, or State downtown.  You saw him conversing hungrily with the gritty and taciturn Swede who was janitor for the block of red-brick flats.  Ben used to follow him around pathetically, engaging him in the talk of the day.  Ben knew no men except the surly Gus, Minnie’s husband.  Gus, the firebrand, thought Ben hardly worthy of his contempt.  If Ben thought, sometimes, of the respect with which he had always been greeted when he clumped down the main street of Commercial, Ill.—­if he thought of how the farmers for miles around had come to him for expert advice and opinion—­he said nothing.

Sometimes the janitor graciously allowed Ben to attend to the furnace of the building in which he lived.  He took out ashes, shovelled coal.  He tinkered and rattled and shook things.  You heard him shovelling and scraping down there, and smelled the acrid odour of his pipe.  It gave him something to do.  He would emerge sooty and almost happy.

“You been monkeying with that furnace again!” Bella would scold.  “If you want something to do, why don’t you plant a garden in the backyard and grow something.  You was crazy enough about it on the farm.”

His face flushed a slow, dull red at that.  He could not explain to her that he lost no dignity in his own eyes in fussing about an inadequate little furnace, but that self-respect would not allow him to stoop to gardening—­he who had reigned over six hundred acres of bountiful soil.

On winter afternoons you saw him sometimes at the movies, whiling away one of his many idle hours in the dim, close-smelling atmosphere of the place.  Tokyo and Petrograd and Gallipoli came to him.  He saw beautiful tiger women twining fair, false arms about the stalwart but yielding forms of young men with cleft chins.  He was only mildly interested.  He talked to any one who would talk to him, though he was naturally a shy man.  He talked to the barber, to the grocer, the druggist, the street-car conductor, the milkman, the iceman.  But the price of wheat did not interest these gentlemen.  They did not know that the price of wheat was the most vital topic of conversation in the world.