George had some queer notions about his business. He followed it for sheer love of it, as I did for money. I’ve seen all the great athletes since, but I never saw one with his wonderful skill and strength, and with the grace of a woman too, or a deer. Now that takes hard, steady work, but he never flinched from it as I did; and when night came, and the people and lights, and I thought of nothing but to get through, I used to think he had the pride of a thousand women in every one of his muscles and nerves: a little applause would fill him with a mad kind of fury of delight and triumph. South had a story that Geroge belonged to some old Knickerbocker family, and had run off from home years ago. I don’t know. There was that wild restless blood in him that no home could have kept him.

We were to stay so long in this town that I found rooms for us with an old couple named Peters, who had but lately moved in from the country, and had half-a-dozen carpenters and masons boarding with them. It was cheaper than the hotel, and George preferred that kind of people to educated men, which made me doubt that story of his having been a gentleman. The old woman Peters was uneasy about taking us, and spoke out quite freely about it when we called, not knowing that George and I were Balacchi Brothers ourselves.

“The house has been respectable so far, gentlemen,” she said. “I don’t know what about taking in them half-naked, drunken play-actors. What do you say, Susy?” to her grand-daughter.

“Wait till you see them, grandmother,” the girl said gently. “I should think that men whose lives depended every night on their steady eyes and nerves would not dare to touch liquor.”

“You are quite right—nor even tobacco,” said George. It was such a prompt, sensible thing for the little girl to say that he looked at her attentively a minute, and then went up to the old lady, smiling: “We don’t look like drinking men, do we, madam?”

“No, no, sir. I did not know that you were the I-talians.” She was quite flustered and frightened, and said cordially enough how glad she was to have us both. But it was George she shook hands with. There was something clean and strong and inspiring about that man that made most women friendly to him on sight.

Why, in two days you’d have thought he’d never had another home than the Peter’s. He helped the old man milk, and had tinkered up the broken kitchen-table, and put in half-a-dozen window-panes, and was intimate with all the boarders; could give the masons the prices of job-work at the East, and put Stoll, the carpenter, on the idea of contract-houses, out of which he afterward made a fortune. It was nothing but jokes and fun and shouts of laughter when he was in the house: even the old man brightened up and told some capital stories. But from the first I noticed that George’s eye followed Susy watchfully wherever she went, though he was as distant and respectful with her as he was with most women. He had a curious kind of respect for women, George had. Even the Slingsbys, that all the men in the theatre joked with, he used to pass by as though they were logs leaning against the wall. They were the posture- girls, and anything worse besides the name I never saw.

There was a thing happened once on that point which I often thought might have given me a clue to his history if I’d followed it up. We were playing in one of the best theatres in New York (they brought us into some opera), and the boxes were filled with fine ladies beautifully dressed, or, I might say, half dressed.

George was in one of the wings. “It’s a pretty sight,” I said to him.

“It’s a shameful sight!” he said with an oath. “The Slingsbys do it for their living, but these women—”

I said they were ladies, and ought to be treated with respect. I was amazed at the heat he was in.

“I had a sister, Zack, and there’s where I learned what a woman should be.”