He liked her quiet
fearlessness in facing the ordeal ahead. Into the bewildering city he felt
her searching anxiously to find good things for her small brood, to make
every dollar count, to keep their little bodies strong, to guard their
hungry little souls from many things she thought were bad. Of all his
daughters, he told himself, she was the one most like his wife.
While she was talking Bruce came in. Of medium height and a wiry build, his
quick kindly smile of greeting did not conceal the fine tight lines about
his mouth and between his eyes. His small trim moustache was black, but his
hair already showed streaks of gray although he was not quite thirty-eight,
and as he lit a cigarette his right hand twitched perceptibly.
Bruce Cunningham had married just after he left law school. He had worked
in a law office which took receiverships by the score, and through managing
bankrupt concerns by slow degrees he had made himself a financial surgeon.
He had set up an office of his own and was doing splendidly. But he worked
under fearful tension. Bruce had to deal with bankrupts who had barely
closed their eyes for weeks, men half out of their minds from the strain,
the struggle to keep up their heads in those angry waters of finance which
Roger vaguely pictured as a giant whirlpool. Though honest enough in his
own affairs, Bruce showed a genial relish for all the tricks of the savage
world which was as the breath to his nostrils.
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