Ed's lapses from surgical cleanliness were a sore trial to the younger man,
fresh from the clinics of Europe. In his downtown office, to which he
would presently make his leisurely progress, he wore a white coat, and
sterilized things of which Dr. Ed did not even know the names.
So, as he came down the stairs, Dr. Ed, who had wiped his tiny knife with a
bit of cotton,--he hated sterilizing it; it spoiled the edge,--thrust it
hastily into his pocket. He had cut boils without boiling anything for a
good many years, and no trouble. But he was wise with the wisdom of the
serpent and the general practitioner, and there was no use raising a
discussion.
Max's morning mood was always a cheerful one. Now and then the way of the
transgressor is disgustingly pleasant. Max, who sat up until all hours of
the night, drinking beer or whiskey-and-soda, and playing bridge, wakened
to a clean tongue and a tendency to have a cigarette between shoes, so to
speak. Ed, whose wildest dissipation had perhaps been to bring into the
world one of the neighborhood's babies, wakened customarily to the dark
hour of his day, when he dubbed himself failure and loathed the Street with
a deadly loathing.
So now Max brought his handsome self down the staircase and paused at the
office door.
"At it, already," he said. "Or have you been to bed?"
"It's after nine," protested Ed mildly. "If I don't start early, I never
get through."
Max yawned.
"Better come with me," he said. "If things go on as they've been doing,
I'll have to have an assistant. I'd rather have you than anybody, of
course." He put his lithe surgeon's hand on his brother's shoulder.
"Where would I be if it hadn't been for you? All the fellows know what
you've done."
In spite of himself, Ed winced. It was one thing to work hard that there
might be one success instead of two half successes. It was a different
thing to advertise one's mediocrity to the world. His sphere of the Street
and the neighborhood was his own. To give it all up and become his younger
brother's assistant--even if it meant, as it would, better hours and more
money--would be to submerge his identity. He could not bring himself to
it.
"I guess I'll stay where I am," he said. "They know me around here, and I
know them. By the way, will you leave this envelope at Mrs. McKee's?
Maggie Rosenfeld is ironing there to-day. It's for her."