e warm weather set
in. The neighbourhood now was aglitter with eating places of all sorts
and degrees, from the humble automat to the proud plush of the Sheridan
Plaza dining room. There were tea-rooms, cafeterias, Hungarian cafes,
chop suey restaurants. At the table d'hote places you got a soup,
followed by a lukewarm plateful of meat, vegetables, salad. The meat
tasted of the vegetables, the vegetables tasted of the meat, and the
salad tasted of both. Before ordering Ray would sit down and peer about
at the food on the near-by tables as one does in a dining car when the
digestive fluids have dried in your mouth at the first whiff through the
doorway. It was on one of these evenings that he noticed Cora's hat.

"What do you wear a hat for all the time?" he asked, testily.

"Hat?"

"Seems to me I haven't seen you without a hat in a month. Gone bald, or
something?" He was often cross like this lately. Grumpy, Cora called it.
Hats were one of Cora's weaknesses. She had a great variety of them.
These added to Ray's feeling of restlessness and impermanence. Sometimes
she wore a hat that came down over her head, covering her forehead and
her eyes, almost. The hair he used to love to touch was concealed.
Sometimes he dined with an ingenue in a poke bonnet; sometimes with a
senorita in black turban and black lace veil, mysterious and
provocative; sometimes with a demure miss in a wistful little
turned-down brim. It was like living with a stranger who was always
about to leave.

When they ate at home, which was rarely, Ray tried, at first, to dawdle
over his coffee and his mild cigar, as he liked to do. But you couldn't
dawdle at a small, inadequate table that folded its flaps and shrank
into a corner the minute you left it. Everything in the apartment
folded, or flapped, or doubled, or shot in, or shot out, or concealed
something else, or pretended to be something it was not. It was very
irritating. Ray took his cigar and his evening paper and wandered
uneasily into the Italian living room, doubling his lean length into
one of his queer, angular hard chairs.

Cora would appear in the doorway, hatted. "Ready?"

"Huh? Where you going?"

"Oh, Ray, aren't you _fun_-ny! You know this is the Crowd's poker night
at Lil's."

The Crowd began to say that old Ray was going queer. Honestly, didja
hear him last week? Talking about the instability of the home, and the
home being the foundation of the state, and the country crumbli