Sam did not understand Janet's point of view. It was all too new and
foreign to everything life had taught him, and in his mind he fought her
ideas doggedly, clinging to his own concrete, practical thoughts and
hopes, but on the train homeward bound, and in his own room later, he
turned over and over in his mind the things she had said and tried in a
dim way to grasp the bigness of the conception of human life she had got
sitting in a wheel chair and looking down into Wabash Avenue.
Sam loved Janet Eberly. No word of that had ever passed between them and
he had seen her hand flash out and grasp the shoulder of Jack Prince when
she was laying down to him some law of life as she saw it, as it had so
often shot out and grasped his own, but had she been able to spring out of
the wheel chair he should have taken her hand and gone with her to the
clergyman within the hour and in his heart he knew that she would have
gone with him gladly.
Janet died suddenly during the second year of Sam's work for the gun
company without a direct declaration of affection from him, but during the
years when they were much together he thought of her as in a sense his
wife and when she died he was desolate, overdrinking night after night and
wandering aimlessly through the deserted streets during hours when he
should have been asleep.
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