Quin | Page 6

Graham, but not a gourmand. Edwin Booth used to say----"
"Sir?" answered Edwin Booth's namesake from the kitchen, where he had been dispatched for more bread.
"No, no, my son, I was referring to----"
But Papa Claude, as usual, did not get to finish the sentence. The advent of the next-door neighbor, who had been invited and then forgotten, caused great amusement owing to the fact that there was no more supper left.
"Give her some bread and jam, Myrna," said Rose; "and if the jam is out, bring the brown sugar. You don't mind, do you, Fan?"
Fan, an amiable blonde person who was going to be fat at forty, declared that she didn't want a thing to eat, honestly she didn't, and that besides she adored bread and brown sugar.
"We won't stop to wash up," said Rose; "Myrna will have loads of time to do it in the morning, because she doesn't have to go to school. We'll just clear the table and let the dishes stand."
"We are incorrigible Bohemians, as you observe," said Mr. Martel to Quin, with a deprecating arching of his fine brows. "We lay too little stress, I fear, on the conventions. But the exigencies of the dramatic profession--of which, you doubtless know, I have been a member for the past forty years----"
"Take him in the sitting-room, Mr. Graham," urged Rose; "I'll bring your coffee in there."
Without apparently being conscious of the fact, Mr. Martel, still discoursing in rounded periods, was transferred to the big chair beside the lamp, while Quin took up his stand on the hearth-rug and looked about him.
Such a jumble of a room as it was! Odds and ends of furniture, the survival of various household wrecks; chipped bric-à-brac; a rug from which the pattern had long ago vanished; an old couch piled with shabby cushions; a piano with scattered music sheets. On the walls, from ceiling to foot-board, hung faded photographs of actors and actresses, most of them with bold inscriptions dashed across their corners in which the donors invariably expressed their friendship, affection, or if the chirography was feminine their devoted love, for "dear Claude Martel." Over the mantel was a portrait of dear Claude himself, taken in the r?le of Mark Antony, and making rather a good job of it, on the whole, with his fine Roman profile and massive brow.
It was all shabby and dusty and untidy; but to Quinby Graham, standing on the hearth-rug and trying to handle his small coffee-cup as if he were used to it, the room was completely satisfying. There was a cozy warmth and mellowness about it, a kindly atmosphere of fellowship, a sense of intimate human relations, that brought a lump into his throat. He had almost forgotten that things could be like this!
So absorbed was he in his surroundings, and in the imposing old actor encompassed by the galaxy of pictured notables, that he lost the thread of Mr. Martel's discourse until he heard him asking:
"What is the present? A clamor of the senses, a roar that deafens us to the music of life. I dwell in the past and in the future, Sergeant Graham--the dear reminiscent past and the glorious unborn future. And that reminds me that Cassius tells me that you are both about to receive your discharge from the army and are ready for the next great adventure. May I ask what yours is to be? A return, perhaps, to your native city?"
"My native city happens to be a river," said Quin. "I was born on a house-boat going up the Yangtse-Kiang."
"Indeed!" cried Mr. Martel with interest. "What a romantic beginning! And your family?"
"Haven't got any. You see, sir," said Quin, expanding under the flattering attention of his host, "my people were all missionaries. Most of them died off before I was fourteen, and I was shipped back to America to go to school. I didn't hold out very long, though. After two years in high school I ran away and joined the navy."
"And since then you have been a soldier of fortune, eh? No cares, no responsibilities. Free to roam the wide world in search of adventure."
Quin studied the end of his cigarette.
"That ain't so good as it sounds," he said. "Sometimes I think I'd amounted to more if I had somebody that belonged to me."
"Isn't it rather early in the season for a young man's fancy to be lightly turning----"
The quotation was lost upon Quin, but the twinkle in the speaker's expressive eye was not.
"I didn't mean that," he laughingly protested; "I mean a mother or a sister or somebody like that, who would be a kind of anchor. Take Cass, for instance; he's steady as a rock."
"Ah! Cassius! One in ten thousand. From the time he was twelve he has shared with me the financial burden. An