go away with
her bones sticking out of his mouth as the horns of a deer protrude
from the jaws of an anaconda, veritable evidence to it and his fellows
of a victory and an orgy to command respect and envy. But he was
familiar, he was complacent and--amazedly she discovered it--he was
big. Her vocabulary could not furnish her with the qualifying word,
or, rather, epithet for his bigness. Horrible was suggested and
retained, but her instinct clamored that there was a fat, oozy word
somewhere which would have brought comfort to her brains and her hands
and feet. He did not keep his arms quiet, but tapped his remarks into
her blouse and her shoulder. Each time his hands touched her they
remained a trifle longer. They seemed to be great red spiders, they
would grip her all round and squeeze her clammily while his face
spiked her to death with its moustache.... And he smiled also, he
giggled and cut capers; his language now was a perpetual witticism at
which he laughed in jerks, and at which she laughed tightly like an
obedient, quick echo: and then, suddenly, without a word, in a dazing
flash, his arms were about her. There was nobody in sight at all, and
he was holding her like a great spider, and his bristly moustache
darted forward to spike her to death, and then, somehow, she was free,
away from him, scudding down the road lightly and fearfully and very
swiftly. "Wait, wait," he called, "wait," but she did not wait.

XXV

Mrs. Cafferty came in that evening for a chat with Mrs. Makebelieve.
There were traces of worry on the lady's face, and she hushed the
children who trooped in her wake with less of good humor than they
were accustomed to. Instead of threatening to smack them on the head
as was usual she did smack them, and she walked surrounded by
lamentations as by a sea.

Things were not going at all well with her. There was a slackness in
her husband's trade so that for days together he was idle, and
although the big woman amended her expenditure in every direction she
could not by any means adjust eight robust appetites to a shrunken
income. She explained her position to Mrs. Makebelieve:--Children
would not, they could not, consent to go on shorter rations than they
had been accustomed to, and it seemed to her that daily, almost
hourly, their appetites grew larger and more terrible. She showed her
right hand whereon the mere usage of a bread-knife had scored a ridge
which was now a permanent disfigurem