In a tone of tremulous scorn Corey said to Herrick, "He's grown a mustache, you see, because Kane wears one!"
"You've no nose for celebrities! Ten Euyck brought him here to-day to pose before him as a literary man and before us as a political lion. But our coroner's founded himself on Gerrish so long I don't know what'll become of him now we've got a District-Attorney who has no particular appetite for the scalps of women!"
Kane! So the District-Attorney was the quiet guest! To Herrick's roused apprehension Kane might just as well have been brought there to be presented with any chance mention which might indicate some circumstance connected with last night. And he understood too well the allusion to Gerrish, a District-Attorney of the past whose successful prosecutions had made a speciality of women; who had never delegated, who had always prosecuted with especial and eloquent ardor, any case in which the defendant was a woman, whether notorious or desperate. Herrick could scarcely restrain a whistle; this did indeed promise a lively inquest! Heaven help the lady of the shadow if this imitation prosecutor should nose her out! It was, perhaps, an immoral exclamation. Yet all the afternoon, as Herrick worked on his story for the _Record_, he could not rout his distaste for his own evidence.
Even after his late and imposing lunch he brought himself to a cheap and early dinner, rather than go back to the Grubey flat. He affected, when he found himself downtown, a little Italian table d'hôte in the neighborhood of Washington Square; much frequented by foreign laborers and so humble that a plaintive and stocky dog, a couple of peremptory cats, and two or three staggering infants with seraphic eyes and a chronic lack of handkerchiefs or garters generally lolled about the beaten earth of the back yard, where the tables were spread under a tent-like sail-cloth. It was all quaint and foreign and easy; and, so far as might be, it was cool; on occasions, the swarthy _dame de comptoir_ was replaced by a spare, square, gray-haired woman, small and neat and Yankee, whom it greatly diverted Herrick to see at home in such surroundings; a little gray parrot, looking exactly like her, climbed and see-sawed about her desk; a vine waved along the fence; the late sun flickered on the clean coarseness of the table-cloths and jeweled them, through the bottles of thin wine, with ruby glories; there was a worthless, poverty-stricken charm about the place, and Herrick sat there, early and alone, smiling to himself with, after all, a certain sense of satisfying busyness and of having come home to life again.