This was why, instead of renewing his acquaintance with Father Cruse, he preferred to halt for a few minutes’ talk with some one of Kitty’s neighbors —­it might be the liveryman next door who had been forty years on the Avenue, or one of the shopkeepers near by, most of whom were welcome to Kitty’s sitting-room and kitchen, and all of whom had shared her coffee.  Or it might be that he would call at Digwell’s, whose undertaker’s shop was across the way and whose door was always open, the gas burning as befitted one liable to be called upon at any hour of the day or night; or perhaps he would pass the time of day with Pestler, the druggist; or give ten minutes to Porterfield, listening to his talk about the growing prices of meat.

Had you asked his former associates why a man of O’Day’s intelligence should have cultivated the acquaintance of an undertaker like Digwell, for instance, whose face was a tombstone, his movements when on duty those of a crow stepping across wet places in a cornfield, they would have shaken their heads in disparaging wonder.  Had you asked Felix he would have answered with a smile:  “Why to hear Digwell laugh!” And then, warming to his subject, he would have told you what a very jolly person Digwell really was, if you were fortunate enough to find him unoccupied in his private den, way back in the rear of his shop.  How he had entertained him by the hour with anecdotes of his early life when he was captain of a baseball team, and what fun he had gotten out of it, and did still, when he could sneak away to help pack the benches.

Had you inquired about Pestler, the druggist, there would have followed some such reply as:  “Pestler?  Did you say?  Because Pestler is one of the most surprising men I know.  He has kept that same shop, he tells me, for twenty-two years.  Of course, he knows only a very little about drugs—­just enough to keep him out of the hands of the police—­but then none of you are aware, perhaps, that Pestler is also a student?  You might think, when you saw only the top of his fuzzy, half-bald head sticking up above the wooden partition, that he was putting up a prescription, but you would be wrong.  What he is really doing, with the aid of his microscope, is dissecting bugs, and pasting them on glass slides for use in the public schools.  And he plays the violin—­and very well, too!  He often entertains me with his music.”

Sanderson, the florist, was another denizen who interested him.  To look at Sanderson tying ribbons on funeral wreaths, no one would ever have supposed that there was rarely a first night at the opera at which he was not present, paying for his ticket, too, and rather despising Pestler, who got his theatre tickets free because he allowed the managers the use of his windows for advertisements.  Felix forgave even his frozen roses whenever the Scotchman, having found a sympathetic listener, launched out upon his earlier experiences among opera stars, especially his acquaintance with Patti, whom he had known before she became great and whom he always spoke of as devotees do of the Madonna—­with bated breath and a sigh of despair that he would never hear her again.