The little dry woman knitted, and the big man moved
lazily in and out in his red flannel shirt, exchanged politics
with the tailor next door through the window, or lounged into
Mrs. Murphy's bar and drank fiercely. Some of the children grew
up and moved away, and other little girls came to buy candy and
eat pink lagniappe fishes, and the shop still thrived.
One day Tony was ill, more than the mummied foot of gout, or the
wheeze of asthma; he must keep his bed and send for the doctor.
She clutched his arm when he came, and pulled him into the tiny
room.
"Is it--is it anything much, doctor?" she gasped.
AEsculapius shook his head as wisely as the occasion would
permit. She followed him out of the room into the shop.
"Do you--will he get well, doctor?"
AEsculapius buttoned up his frock coat, smoothed his shining hat,
cleared his throat, then replied oracularly,
"Madam, he is completely burned out inside. Empty as a shell,
madam, empty as a shell. He cannot live, for he has nothing to
live on."
As the cobblestones rattled under the doctor's equipage rolling
leisurely up Prytania Street, Tony's wife sat in her chair and
laughed,--laughed with a hearty joyousness that lifted the film
from the dull eyes and disclosed a sparkle beneath.
The drear days went by, and Tony lay like a veritable Samson
shorn of his strength, for his voice was sunken to a hoarse,
sibilant whisper, and his black eyes gazed fiercely from the
shock of hair and beard about a white face.
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