he idea."

Tillie pressed a black-felt sailor tight down on her head until only a
rim of brown hair remained, slid into her black jacket, and hurried out
with an army of workers treading at her slightly run-down heels and
nerves.

Youth, even the fag-end of Youth, is like a red-blooded geranium that
fights to bloom though transplanted from a garden bed to a tin can in a
cellar window. A faint-as-dawn pink persisted in flowing underneath the
indoor white of Miss Prokes's cheeks--the last rosy shadow of a
maltreated girlhood, which too long had defied the hair-line wrinkles,
the notion-counter with the not-to-be-used stool behind it, nine hours
of arc-light substitute for the sunshine on the hillside and the green
shade of the dell.

At the doors a taupe-colored dusk and a cold November rain closed round
her like a wet blanket. She shrank back against the building and let the
army tramp past her. They dissolved into the stream like a garden hose
spraying the ocean.

Broadway was black and shining as polished gunmetal, with reflections of
its million lights staggering down into the wet asphalt. Umbrellas
hurried and bobbed as if an army of giant mushrooms had suddenly
insurrected; cabs skidded, honked, dodged, and doubled their rates;
home-going New York bought evening papers, paid as it entered, and
strap-hung its way to Bronx and Harlem firesides.

The fireside of the Bronx is the steam-radiator. Its lullabies are sung
before a gilded three-coil heater; its shaving-water and kettle are
heated on that same contrivance. It is as much of an epic in apartment
living as condensed milk and folding-davenports.

All of which has little enough to do with Miss Tillie Prokes, except
that in her lifetime she had hammered probably a caskful of nails into
the tops of condensed-milk cans. Also she could unfold her own
red-velours davenport; cold-cream her face; sugar-water her hair and put
it up in kids; climb into bed and fall asleep with a despatch that might
have made more than one potentate, counting sheep in his hair-mattressed
four-poster, aguish with envy.

Miss Prokes yawned as she waited and regarded a brilliantly illuminated
display window of curve-fingered ladies in exquisite waxen attitudes and
nineteen-fifty crepe-de-Chine gowns. Her breath clouded the plate-glass,
and she drew her initials in the circle and yawned again.

With the last driblet of employees from the store a woman cut diagonally
through a group an