The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Brute, by Frederic Arnold Kummer, Illustrated by Frank Snapp

Title: The Brute

Author: Frederic Arnold Kummer

Release Date: June 28, 2011 [eBook #36551]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BRUTE***

E-text prepared by D Alexander
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
(http://www.pgdp.net)

Copyright, 1912, by
W. J. WATT & COMPANY

Published, April

“IT’S A LIE,” HE GASPED HOARSELY, THEN SANK BACK IN HORROR

CONTENTS

THE BRUTE

CHAPTER I

Every evening, almost, Donald Rogers and his wife Edith sat in a plain little living-room in their apartment in Harlem, and worked until ten or eleven o’clock. By that time they were both ready to go to bed. It was not very exciting. Edith darned stockings or sewed; Donald toiled at his desk, writing letters—going over reports. Sometimes, very rarely, they went to the theater. They had done the same thing for nearly eight years, and to Edith, at least, it seemed a very long time.

The room in which they sat reflected in its furnishings much of the life these two led. It seemed to suggest, in every line, an unceasing conflict between poverty and ambition—not, indeed, the poverty of the really poor, of those in actual want, but the poverty of the well born, of those whose desires are forever infinitely beyond their means.

This was evidenced by many curious contrasts. The furniture, for instance, was for the most part of that cheap and gloomy variety known as mission oak, yet the designs were good, as though its purchasers had striven toward some ideal which they had not the means to realize. The rug on the floor, an imitation oriental, was still of excellent coloring; the pictures showed taste in their selection—such taste, indeed, as is possible under the limitations imposed by a slender purse—among them might have been discovered a charming little water-color and some reproductions of etchings by Whistler.

The curtains were imitation lace, the ornaments on the mantel imitation bronze, the cushions in the Morris chair imitation Spanish leather. The keynote of the whole room was imitation—everything in it, almost, was the result of refinement and excellent taste on the one hand, hampered by lack of money on the other. The effect was somewhat that given by twenty dollar sets of ermine furs, or ropes of pearls at bargain-counter prices. Edith, caring more about such matters than her husband, realized this note of imitation keenly, but found it more satisfactory to have even the shadow of what she really desired than to drop back to another level of existence, and content herself with ingrain carpets, shiny yellow furniture, and the sort of pictures made of mother of pearl, which are given away with tea-store coupons. In her present environment, she chafed—in the other, she would have been suffocated.

On this particular night in March, they were at home as usual. Donald had composed himself at his desk, hunched over, his head resting upon his left hand, staring at the papers