ders
drooped. His cigarette dangled limp. Disappointment curved his lips,
burdened his eyes. "_Swell_ chanst!"

OLD MAN MINICK

His wife had always spoiled him outrageously. No doubt of that. Take,
for example, the matter of the pillows merely. Old man Minick slept
high. That is, he thought he slept high. He liked two plump pillows on
his side of the great, wide, old-fashioned cherry bed. He would sink
into them with a vast grunting and sighing and puffing expressive of
nerves and muscles relaxed and gratified. But in the morning there was
always one pillow on the floor. He had thrown it there. Always, in the
morning, there it lay, its plump white cheek turned reproachfully up at
him from the side of the bed. Ma Minick knew this, naturally, after
forty years of the cherry bed. But she never begrudged him that extra
pillow. Each morning, when she arose, she picked it up on her way to
shut the window. Each morning the bed was made up with two pillows on
his side of it, as usual.

Then there was the window. Ma Minick liked it open wide. Old man Minick,
who rather prided himself on his modernism (he called it being up to
date) was distrustful of the night air. In the folds of its sable
mantle lurked a swarm of dread things--colds, clammy miasmas, fevers.

"Night air's just like any other air," Ma Minick would say, with some
asperity. Ma Minick was no worm; and as modern as he. So when they went
to bed the window would be open wide. They would lie there, the two old
ones, talking comfortably about commonplace things. The kind of talk
that goes on between a man and a woman who have lived together in
wholesome peace (spiced with occasional wholesome bickerings) for more
than forty years.

"Remind me to see Gerson to-morrow about that lock on the basement door.
The paper's full of burglars."

"If I think of it." She never failed to.

"George and Nettie haven't been over in a week now."

"Oh, well, young folks.... Did you stop in and pay that Koritz the fifty
cents for pressing your suit?"

"By golly, I forgot again! First thing in the morning."

A sniff. "Just smell the Yards." It was Chicago.

"Wind must be from the west."

Sleep came with reluctant feet, but they wooed her patiently. And
presently she settled down between them and they slept lightly. Usually,
some time during the night, he awoke, slid cautiously and with infinite
stealth from beneath the covers and closed the wide-flung window to
withi