ed forth a
brassy flood of sound. Trains, on the elevated road at the corner,
crashed by. Martie had been packing a lunch; she went slowly back to
the cut loaf and the rapidly softening butter.

"Happy, Teddy?" she asked, when they had found seats in the train, and
were rushing over the baking stillness of the city.

"Are you, Moth'?" he asked quickly.

She nodded, smiling. But, for some reasons vaguely defined, she was
heavy-hearted. The city's endless drama of squalor and pain was all
about her; she could not understand, she could not help, she could not
even lift her own little problem out of the great total of failures!
All day long the sense of impotence assailed her.

Wallace was at home, when they came back, heavily asleep across his
bed. Martie, with firmly shut lips, helped him into bed, and made the
strong coffee for which he longed. After drinking it, he gave her a
resentful, painstaking account of his unexpected return. His face was
flushed, his voice thick. She gathered that he had lost his position.

"He came right up to me before Young, d'ye see? He put it up to me.
'Nelson,' I says, 'Nelson, this isn't a straight deal!' I says. 'My
stuff is my stuff,' I says, 'but this is something else again.'
'Wallie,' he says, 'that may be right, too. But listen,' he says. I
says, 'I'm going to do damn little listening to you or Young!' I says,
'Cut that talk about my missing rehearsals--'"

The menacing, appealing voice went on and on. Martie watched him in
something far beyond scorn or shame. He had not shaved recently, his
face was blotched.

"What else could I do, Mart?" he asked presently. She answered with a
long sigh:

"Nothing, I suppose, Wallace."

After a while he slept heavily. The afternoon was brassy hot. Women
manipulated creaking clotheslines across the long double row of
backyards; the day died on a long, gasping twilight. Martie let Teddy
go to the candy store for ten cents' worth of ice cream for his supper.
She made herself iced tea, and deliberately forced herself to read.
To-night she would not think. After a while she wrote her letter of
regret to George Curley.

The situation was far from desperate, after all. Wallace had a headache
the next day, but on the day after that he shaved and dressed
carefully, assured his wife that this experience should be the last of
its type, and began to look for an engagement. He had some money, and
he insisted upon buying her a thin, dark gown, loos