Free Evening of the Good Samaritan by Dorothy Salisbury Davis Page B

newer—and there was room for a great many more. The feel of the prairie was still to be got at the heart of the city; there seemed a reluctance to build up. For mile after mile, the city clung to the ground and groped, when it moved, aimlessly into the flats, leaving the sky to the winds. It was a great shame that a city of such promise should wallow on the ground because its generation of pioneers had given way to their politician sons and businessmen, to corporate bigness, where little men were allowed authority and big men hamstrung in the chain of it.
    He found himself outside the McCormick Building, on the thirty-first floor of which were the law offices of a firm that included George Allan Bergner. Bergner would be either there or in Washington, or in the state capital; but he was not wallowing in the flats of Traders City wherever he was. George had got religion: the New Deal, hallelujah: the great day a-coming. Government not just of the people, by the people, but government for the people: the NRA, the AAA, the CCC, the PWA and the WPA ad nauseum —or ad glorium? Alexander Winthrop was not prepared to say. He was not prepared, that was the trouble. For the first time in his life he was not prepared to take full advantage of an opportunity.
    This was not entirely true, he realized, turning reluctantly back toward his office. What was true was that for the first time his course of action in a given opportunity was not his alone to determine.
    He made it a practice not to look around the waiting room, going into his office. Too often a friendly glance to the wrong person at such a moment discovered him half-committed before he ever got into negotiation. Normally a man of high spirits, he rather enjoyed acting glum and preoccupied pushing by the oak railing and into his milk-glassed inner office.
    When Winthrop got to his desk and his secretary reminded him that he had a date with a Doctor Marcus Hogan, he was for the moment puzzled. Then he remembered, and threw back his head in laughter. He laughed with the deep physical gratification to be got from the ironic. But when the laughter passed, all he could feel was the sharper edge of his own problem.
    “Is he here?”
    “He’s been waiting for almost an hour, doctor.”
    Winthrop smiled and his voice was nastily silken. “Then why didn’t you call me, my dear? He’s a friend of Professor Fitzgerald’s.”
    Marcus had not minded the wait. He envied men whose days were more crowded than his own. And Dr. Winthrop’s secretary had provided him with a fine collection of medical journals. She had got a faint scent of the dispensary from him and had hoped to tell him of her own pains—but at the last moment failed of courage.
    “I’m sorry to have kept you waiting, my boy,” Winthrop said, and gave him a lingering handshake that bore Marcus down into the leather chair at the side of the desk.
    “I caught up on some homework,” Marcus said, “thanks to your library.”
    “So. You’re a friend of Professor Fitzgerald’s. High recommendation, that, you know. How long have you known him?”
    “He’s a friend of my father’s,” Marcus said.
    “Oh, is he?” Winthrop said pleasantly. “Well, now, tell me about yourself.”
    Winthrop, however, scarcely listened. From the moment he had laid eyes on the young, big-boned, long-limbed visitor, Winthrop wondered how he had got to Walter Fitzgerald, why, and what had prompted Fitzgerald to say a good word on his behalf. He was struck with the puzzle Walter Fitzgerald was to him still. He knew him as little now as when he had first met, misjudged, and all but hero-worshiped him, the very reverse of their present positions. Fitzgerald had been a handsome man fifteen years before, his features finely wrought in the way of a piece of high-style art: he had looked to Winthrop then like a Roman orator; he carried himself with grace, a man fond of walking, and his voice was finely modulated, his phrasing elegant;