om
seven to four you might see a pair of boudoir caps leaning from opposite
bedroom windows, conversing across back porches, pausing in the task of
sweeping front steps, standing at a street corner, laden with grocery
bundles. Minnie wasted hours in what she called "running over to ma's
for a minute." The two quarrelled a great deal, being so nearly of a
nature. But the very qualities that combated each other seemed, by some
strange chemical process, to bring them together as well.

"I'm going downtown to-day to do a little shopping," Minnie would say.
"Do you want to come along, ma?"

"What you got to get?"

"Oh, I thought I'd look at a couple of little dresses for Pearlie."

"When I was your age I made every stitch you wore."

"Yeh, I bet they looked like it, too. This ain't the farm. I got all I
can do to tend to the house, without sewing."

"I did it. I did the housework and the sewin' and cookin', an'
besides--"

"A swell lot of housekeepin' you did. You don't need to tell me."

The bickering grew to a quarrel. But in the end they took the downtown L
together. You saw them, flushed of face, with twitching fingers,
indulging in a sort of orgy of dime spending in the five-and-ten-cent
store on the wrong side of State Street. They pawed over bolts of cheap
lace and bins of stuff in the fetid air of the crowded place. They would
buy a sack of salted peanuts from the great mound in the glass case, or
a bag of the greasy pink candy piled in vile profusion on the counter,
and this they would munch as they went.

They came home late, fagged and irritable, and supplemented their
hurried dinner with hastily bought and so-called food from the near-by
delicatessen.

Thus ran the life of ease for Ben Westerveld, retired farmer. And so we
find him lying impatiently in bed, rubbing a nervous forefinger over the
edge of the sheet and saying to himself that, well, here was another
day. What day was it? Le'see now. Yesterday was--yesterday--a little
feeling of panic came over him. He couldn't remember what yesterday had
been. He counted back laboriously and decided that to-day must be
Thursday. Not that it made any difference.

* * * * *

They had lived in the city almost a year now. But the city had not
digested Ben. He was a leathery morsel that could not be assimilated.
There he stuck in Chicago's crop, contributing nothing, gaining nothing.
A rube in a comic collar ambling aimlessly