hanging them up. The floor was empty of customers
thus early. He strode over to her. She turned. Into her eyes there
leaped a look which she quickly veiled as had been taught her by a
thousand thousand female ancestors.

"I got your postals," she said.

Florian said nothing.

"My, you're brown!"

Florian said nothing.

"Did you--have a good time?"

Florian said nothing.

"What--what----" Her hand went to her throat, where his eyes were
fastened.

Then Florian spoke. "How white your throat is!" he said. "How white your
throat is!"

Myra stepped out, then, from among the covert coats on the rack. Her
head was lifted high on the creamy column that supported it. She had
her pride, had Myra.

"It's no whiter than it was a month ago, that I can see."

"I know it." His tone was humble, with a little pleading note in it. "I
know a lot of things that I didn't know a month ago, Myra."

THE SUDDEN SIXTIES

Hannah Winter was sixty all of a sudden, as women of sixty are. Just
yesterday--or the day before, at most--she had been a bride of twenty in
a wine-coloured silk wedding gown, very stiff and rich. And now here she
was, all of a sudden, sixty.

The actual anniversary that marked her threescore had had nothing to do
with it. She had passed that day painlessly enough--happily, in fact.
But now, here she was, all of a sudden, consciously, bewilderingly,
sixty. This is the way it happened!

She was rushing along Peacock Alley to meet her daughter Marcia. Any one
who knows Chicago knows that smoke-blackened pile, the Congress Hotel;
and any one who knows the Congress Hotel has walked down that glittering
white marble crypt called Peacock Alley. It is neither so glittering nor
so white, nor, for that matter, so prone to preen itself as it was in
the hotel's palmy '90s. But it still serves as a convenient short cut on
a day when Chicago's lake wind makes Michigan Boulevard a hazard, and
thus Hannah Winter was using it. She was to have met Marcia at the
Michigan Boulevard entrance at two, sharp. And here it was 2.07. When
Marcia said two, there she was at two, waiting, lips slightly
compressed. When you came clattering up, breathless, at 2.07, she said
nothing in reproach. But within the following half hour bits of her
conversation, if pieced together, would have summed up something like
this:

"I had to get the children off in time and give them their lunch first
because it's wash day and Lutie's busy wit