On Sunday
afternoons they went to walk in the streets, or, taking two girl friends
of Frank's, who were also students at the medical school, on their arms,
they went to the park and sat upon benches under the trees.
For one of these young women Sam conceived a regard that approached
tenderness. Sunday after Sunday he spent with her, and once, walking
through the park on an evening in the late fall, the dry brown leaves
rustling under their feet and the sun going down in red splendour before
their eyes, he took her hand and walked in silence, feeling tremendously
alive and vital as he had felt on that other night walking under the trees
of Caxton with the dark-skinned daughter of banker Walker.
That nothing came of the affair and that after a time he did not see the
girl again was due, he thought, to his own growing interest in money
making and to the fact that there was in her, as in Frank Eckardt, a blind
devotion to something that he could not himself understand.
Once he had a talk with Eckardt of the matter. "She is fine and purposeful
like a woman I knew in my home town," he said, thinking of Eleanor Telfer,
"but she will not talk to me of her work as sometimes she talks to you.
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