the ruin of many a good surgeon. You read too much, Dick. Yon Cassius hath a lean and hungry look. You know too much. The letter killeth the spirit, you know. Me—Dick, did you ever know me to take anything out that I didn’t put back? Anyway, don’t I always leave’em something to go on with? I’m no scholar, Dick. I’ve never had your advantages. I’m a self-made butcher. I’m a carpenter, Dick. I’m an interior decorator. I’m a mechanic, a plumber, an electrician, a butcher, a tailor, a jeweller. I’m a jewel, a gem, a diamond in the rough, Dick. I’m a practical man. I take out their works, spit upon them, trim off the dirty edges, and send them on their way again. I economize, Dick; I throw away everything I can’t use, and use everything I throw away. Who made the Pope a tailbone from his knuckle? Who made the dog howl? Aha— that’s why the governor looks so young. We are filled up with useless machinery, Dick. Efficiency, economy, power! Have you a Little Fairy in your Home? You haven’t! Then let the Gold Dust Twins do the work! Ask Ben—he knows!”
“O my God!” laughed Ben thinly, “listen to that, won’t you?”
Two doors below, directly before the Post Office, Pete Mascari rolled upward with corrugated thunder the shutters of his fruit shop. The pearl light fell coolly upon the fruity architecture, on the pyramided masonry of spit-bright wine-saps, the thin sharp yellow of the Florida oranges, the purple Tokays, sawdust-bedded. There was a stale fruity odor from the shop of ripening bananas, crated apples, and the acrid tang of powder; the windows are filled with Roman candles, crossed rockets, pinwheels, squat green Happy Hooligans, and multilating Jack Johnsons, red cannoncrackers, and tiny acrid packets of crackling spattering firecrackers. Light fell a moment on the ashen corpsiness of his face and on the liquid Sicilian poison of his eyes.
“Don’pincha da grape. Pinch da banan’!”
A street-car, toy-green with new Spring paint, went squareward.
“Dick,” said McGuire more soberly, “take the job, if you like.”
Ravenel shook his head.
