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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
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