The Equations of Love Read Online Free PDF

was as this nice and eager and atoninglittle boy that Mort walked into the store, but people did not see that he was a little boy, and one or two women in their hurry felt the pleasant feminine glow that the large masculinity of Mort often evoked from women quite unreasonably. People are very deceiving and you never can tell.
    He took his place beside a man who was engaged in buying nylon stockings. This was a tubby red-faced well-dressed man whom Mort did not at first recognize because he did not at first look at him very carefully, but I am sorry to say that it was Mr. H. Y. Dunkerley. After Mr. Dunkerley had boarded the plane at Calgary he had suddenly realized that he had forgotten to bring his wife some little present from New York, and so he had taken out his red notebook, and had made a note in it because he left nothing to chance – a note to buy his wife a dozen nylons directly he got to Vancouver, and here he was, buying her a dozen nylons.
    “Half a dozen of these,” he said, indicating some so thin as to be almost non-existent, “and half a dozen of these.”
    “Thank you, Mr. Dunkerley,” said the nice girl who seemed to know him, and Mort, who as I said was feeling good and in the self-satisfied frame of mind of a man who is buying nylons, even one pair, for his wife, suddenly recognized Mr. H. Y. Dunkerley. He was feeling jocular, or he would never have said to Mr. H. Y. Dunkerley (as he did) in a deprecating half-familiar manner as one stocking-buying male to another, “You won’t recognize
me
, Mr. Dunkerley, but I was working up at your place today. Buying some nylons for the little lady, I see! Same here. I know I’m only a working man,” continued Mort with a simple-sounding nobility which had no basis in fact, “but I am sure that under the circumstances you will pardon me speaking to you.”
    Mr. H. Y. Dunkerley turned and looked full at Mort with great dislike. It was too bad no one had warned Mort Johnson, but, in the very first words that he had addressed to Mr. H. Y. Dunkerley he had made him very mad.
    Mr. Horace Dunkerley had been born in the province of Nova Scotia, near a fine place called Antigonish. He regarded Antigonish, which he had never revisited, with the same sentiment, with the same romantic attachment that people seem to think that only Highlanders have for their homes. Or Jews even. The whole of this romantic attachment – not so foreign to successful business men as some people think – was impregnated with the memory of a hard-working but happy boyhood spent in helping his father who was a hand-logger and had a yoke of oxen, and his elder brothers. He had been to school in Antigonish, but not much. He was a woodsman from the age of ten, and by the time he was sixteen he was doing a man’s work daily. At the age of twenty-four he had worked his way to British Columbia. By the time he was thirty, through continued industry, he had come to own a small shingle mill. Before he had finished paying for that shingle mill he had established another. And because he was that kind of person he was now a lumber man in a big way. He still worked much too hard and too long, with his head rather than, as heretofore, with his arms and legs; and while he had worked continuously, and prospered, he had established within himself a violent phobia which caused him nearly to explode when he heard the simple word “working man” uttered, unless it was applied to anyone who knew what “work” was in the sense that he, Horace Dunkerley, knew what “work” was, and had known all his life. So that at dinners – which he now attended frequently, or in his clubs – of which he now had a fair number, or on planes or trains – which heseemed to frequent, when he heard the word “working man” applied loosely to people who worked only eight hours or less a day by choice or by law, he said what he thought about it, in full. So this was the Achilles’ heel of Mr. H. Y. Dunkerley, and Mort had