"
In the lobby of a tall office building, where he stopped at a little cigar
counter to get fresh tobacco for his pipe, he looked so fixedly at a woman
clad in long soft furs, that in alarm she hurried out to her machine to
wait for her escort, who had evidently gone up the elevator.
Once more in the street, Sam shuddered at the thought of the hands that
had laboured that the soft cheeks and the untroubled eyes of this one
woman might be. Into his mind came the face and figure of a little
Canadian nurse who had once cared for him through an illness--her quick,
deft fingers and her muscular little arms. "Another such as she," he
muttered, "has been at work upon the face and body of this gentlewoman; a
hunter has gone into the white silence of the north to bring out the warm
furs that adorn her; for her there has been a tragedy--a shot, and red
blood upon the snow, and a struggling beast waving its little claws in the
air; for her a woman has worked through the morning, bathing her white
limbs, her cheeks, her hair."
For this gentlewoman also there had been a man apportioned, a man like
himself, who had cheated and lied and gone through the years in pursuit of
the dollars to pay all of the others, a man of power, a man who could
achieve, could accomplish.
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