Late on Sunday evening he re-appeared, with empty
pockets, unsteady step, blood-shot eyes, and a noisy attempt at self-
possessed unconcern, to hurry upstairs and crawl into bed in preparation
for another week of toil and respectability. The man had a certain
Rabelaisian sense of humour and kept score of the new ladies met on his
weekly flights by pencil marks upon his bedroom wall. He once took Sam
upstairs to show his record. A row of them ran half around the room.
Besides the bachelor there was a sister, a tall gaunt woman of thirty-five
who taught school, and the housekeeper, thirty, mild, and blessed with a
remarkably sweet speaking voice. Then there was a medical student in the
front room, Sam in an alcove off the hall, a grey-haired woman
stenographer, whom Jake called Marie Antoinette, and a buyer from a
wholesale dry-goods house, with a vivacious, fun-loving little Southern
wife.
The women in the Pergrin house seemed to Sam tremendously concerned about
their health and each evening talked of the matter, he thought, more than
his mother had talked during her illness. While Sam lived with them they
were all under the influence of a strange sort of faith healer and took
what they called "Health Suggestion" treatments.
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