d car settles down to
apathy, for, after all, the incident is in its essence part of the
dailiness of New York.

The young wife gets home, obsessed by the fact that she has struck a man
in the face in a public vehicle. She is still blushing when she relates
the affair in a rush of talk to another young wife in the flat next to
hers. "For Heaven's sake don't tell my husband," she implores. "If he
knew he'd leave me forever!" And the young husband comes home, after his
own personal dose of street-car, preoccupied, fatigued, nervous, hungry,
demanding to be loved. And the young wife has to behave as though she
had been lounging all the afternoon in a tea-gown on a soft sofa.
Curious that, although she is afraid of her husband's wrath, the
temptation to tell him grows stronger! Indeed, is it not a rather fine
thing that she has done, and was not the salute of the admiring male
flattering and sweet? Not many tiny wives would have had the pluck to
slap a brute's face. She tells the young husband. It is an error of tact
on her part. For he, secretly exacerbated, was waiting for just such an
excuse to let himself go. He is angry, he is outraged--as she had said
he would be. What--his wife, _his_-etc., etc.!

A night full of everything except sleep; full of Elevated and rumbling
cars, and trumps of autos, and the eternal liveliness of the cobbled
street, and all incomprehensible noises, and stuffiness, and the sense
of other human beings too close above, too close below, and to the left
and to the right, and before and behind, the sense that there are too
many people on earth! What New-Yorker does not know the wakings after
the febrile doze that ends such a night? The nerves like taut strings;
love turned into homicidal hatred; and the radiator damnably tapping,
tapping!... The young husband afoot and shaved and inexpensively
elegant, and he is demanding his fried eggs. The young wife is afoot,
too, manoeuvering against the conspiracies of the janitor, who lives far
below out of sight, but who permeates her small flat like a malignant
influence.... Hear the whistling of the dumb-waiter!... Eggs are
demanded, authoritatively, bitterly. If glances could kill, not only
that flat but the whole house would be strewn with corpses.... Eggs!...

Something happens, something arrives, something snaps; a spell is broken
and horror is let loose. "Take your eggs!" cries the tiny wife, in a
passion. The eggs fly across the table, and the fr