"I wish I were out of it."
"Well, I hear they're going to begin rehearsing some early openings next month. There'll be suping."
"Is that better?"
"Oh my, yes. . . . I'll call on Bert to-night or to-morrow, and then we'll see what we can do. . . . Let's take a walk now, and forget it."
Don returned to his "boosting," that afternoon, with the hope that he should soon be free of it; but he returned in a disgust of it which made it almost unendurable now that "Tower" had admitted what a degradation it was. The day was steamingly hot and humid; the air was blue with a choking haze; and the stones of the Bowery, still wet from a previous night's rain, seemed sweating, greased, slimy with a thin mud that slipped under the heel. The "barker" in the door of the Musee was shouting impatiently, the perspiration running down his neck into the soiled handkerchief which he had stuffed inside his collar. The free performance dragged on without spirit. The "spieler" wiped his forehead, his eloquence gone mechanical, a thing learned by rote and feebly repeated. The manager chafed over the meagreness of the audiences that gathered to all this "ballyhooing" and were herded in by Don and his fellow boosters.
Don did not speak to any of the other "touts"; he had never done so; and they had never made any approaches to him, knowing—as "Tower" had said—that he was not one of them. They showed no curiosity concerning him, for curiosity is not encouraged on the
