home."

"Ya, ya, Becky, it's--it's all right. Ya, ya, Becky."

SUPERMAN

The canker of the city is loneliness. It flourishes--an insidious
paradox--where men meet nose to nose in Subway rushes and live layer on
layer in thousand-tenant tenement houses. It thrives in
three-dollars-a-week fourth-floor back rooms, so thinly partitioned that
the crumple of the rejection-slip and the sobs of the class poetess from
Molino, Missouri, percolate to the four-dollars-a-week fourth-floor
front and fuddle the piano salesman's evening game of solitaire. It is a
malignant parasite, which eats through the thin walls of hall bedrooms
and the thick walls of gold bedrooms, and eats out the hearts it finds
there, leaving them black and empty, like untenanted houses.

Sometimes love sees the To Let sign, hangs white Swiss curtains at the
window, paints the shutters green, plants a bed of red geraniums in the
front yard, and moves in. Again, no tenant applies; the house mildews
with the damp of its own emptiness; children run when they pass it after
dark; and the threshold decays. The heart must be tenanted or it falls
out of repair and rots. Doctors called in the watches of the night to
resuscitate such hearts climb out of bed reluctantly. It is a malady
beyond the ken of the stethoscope.

One such heart beat in a woman's breast so rapidly that it crowded out
her breath; and she pushed the cotton coverlet back from her bosom, rose
to her elbow, and leaned out beyond her bed into the darkness of the
room.

"Jimmie? Essie? That you, Jimmie?"

The thumping of her heart answered her, and the loud ticking of a clock
that was inaudible during the day suddenly filled the third-floor rear
room of the third-floor rear apartment. The continual din of the street
slumped to the intermittent din of late evening; the last graphophone in
the building observed the nine-o'clock silence clause of the lease at
something after ten, and scratched its last syncopated dance theme into
the tired recording disk of the last tired brain. An upholstered chair,
sunk in the room's pool of darkness, trembled on its own tautened
springs, and the woman trembled of that same tautness and leaned
farther out.

"Who's there? That you, Jimmie?"

Tick-tock-tick-tock-tick-tock!

She huddled the coverlet up under her chin and lay back on her pillow,
but with her body so rigid that only half her weight relaxed to the
mattress; and behind her tight-closed eyes