-way
up. Gee, how I hate it!"

"I'll be waiting right here in front of Joe's place, Goldie. If you need
me just shoot the shade all the way up."

"I won't need you."

"Well, then, light the gas, pull the shade all the way down, and that'll
mean all's well."

"Swell!" she said. "Down comes the shade--and all's well!"

"Good!"

They smiled, and their breaths clouded between them; and down through
the high-walled street the wind shot javelin-like and stung red into
their cheeks, and in Eddie's ears and round his heart the blood buzzed.

Goldie crossed the street and went up the steps lightly, her feet
grating the brown stone like fine-grained sandpaper. When she unlocked
the front door the cave-like mustiness and the cold smell of unsunned
hallways and the conglomerate of food smells from below met her at the
threshold. Memories like needle-tongued insects stung her.

The first-floor front she opened slowly, pausing after every creak of
the door; and the gas she fumbled because her hand trembled, and the
match burned close to her fingers before she found the tip.

She turned up the flame until it sang, and glanced about her fearfully,
with one hand on her bruised cheek and her underlip caught in by her
teeth.

Mr. Trimp's room was as expressive as a lady's glove still warm from her
hand. He might have slipped out of it and let it lie crumpled, but in
his own image.

The fumes of bay-rum and stale beer struggled for supremacy. The
center-table, with a sickening litter of empty bottles and dead ashes,
was dreary as cold mutton in its grease, or a woman's painted face at
crack o' dawn, or the moment when the flavor of love becomes as tansy.

A red-satin slipper, an unhygienic drinking-goblet, which has leaked and
slopped over full many a non-waterproof romance, lay on the floor, with
its red run into many pinks and its rosette limp as a wad of paper.
Goldie picked her careful way round it. Fear and nausea and sickness at
the heart made her dizzy.

The dresser, with its wavy mirror, was strewn with her husband's
neckties; an uncorked bottle of bay-rum gave out its last faint fumes.

She opened the first long drawer with a quivering intake of breath and
pulled out a shirt-waist, another, and yet another, and a coarse white
petticoat with a large-holed embroidery flounce. Then she dragged a
suit-case, which was wavy like the mirror, through the blur of her
tears, out from under the bed; and while she fumbled wi