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Through the Shadows with O'HenryBut he would pretend to like them. She was bright and happy, but she had little to say. Many a time the three of us had dinner together in New York on my first visit. There was a certain fairy- like charm to her—she was so unobtrusive. We scarcely noticed her presence. She was content to listen in smiling quiet to Porter's talk. When he spoke to her it was with the gentle deference due a queen. One night he put a red and green handkerchief in his coat pocket. I looked at him amazed. Rich, harmonious colors were his preference. He smiled. "She sent it up to me. I don't wish to wound her.' Prince, then pauper, Prodigal one day—broke the next. Whim was his bookkeeper. It piled a big deficit on the prosy, matter-of-fact side of the ledger, but it splashed the inner, realer pages with a bounteous, unaccountable credit. With a higher kind of reckoning it gave us Bill Porter—reckless of the superficial values ; unerring in his devotion to the better standard as he saw it. CHAPTER XXXII. New Year's eve; the last talk; "a missionary after all." As one who stood in the world's highway while the rushing multitude in the ever shifting pageant of Life went by, each scene flashing upon the vivid negative of his mind a new record, each picture different, unexpected, developing new lights and shades—like that in his relation to Life was Bill Porter ...» |
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