owly and like a withered Suzanne, who dared not
blush through her wrinkles.

The black wrapper, with empty arms dangling, she spread across a chair,
and atop of it a black cotton petticoat, sans all the gentle mysteries
of lace and frill. Lastly, beside the bed, in the very attitude of the
service of love, she placed her shoes--expressive shoes, swollen from
swollen joints, and full of the capacity for labor.

Then Mrs. Ginsburg climbed into bed, knees first, threw backward over
the foot-board the blue-and-white coverlet, and drew the sheet up about
her. A fresh-as-water breeze blew inward the lace curtain, admitting a
streak of light across her eyes and a merry draught about her head. The
parlor clock tonged the half-hour.

Silence for a while, then the black rush of a train, an intermittent
little plaint like the chirrup of a bird in its cage, the squeak of a
bed-post, and a succession of the unimportant noises that belong solely
to the mystery of night.

Finally, from under the sheet, the tremolo of a moan--the sob of a heart
that aches and, aching, dares not break.

THE OTHER CHEEK

Romance has more lives than a cat. Crushed to earth beneath the
double-tube, non-skiddable tires of a sixty-horse-power limousine, she
allows her prancing steed to die in the dust of yesterday and elopes
with the chauffeur.

Love has transferred his activities from the garden to the
electric-heated taxi-cab and suffers fewer colds in the head. No,
romance is not dead--only reincarnated; she rode away in divided skirt
and side-saddle, and motored back in goggles. The tree-bark messages of
the lovers of Arden are the fifty-word night letters of to-day.

The first editions of the Iliad were writ in the tenderest flesh parts
of men's hearts, and truly enough did Moses blast his sublime messages
out of the marble of all time; but why bury romance with the typewriter
as a headstone?

Why, indeed--when up in the ninth-floor offices of A. L. Gregory,
stenographers and expert typewriters--Miss Goldie Flint, with hair the
color of heat-lightning, and wrists that jangled to the rolled-gold
music of three bracelets, could tick-tack a hundred-word-a-minute love
scene that was destined, after her neat carbon copies were distributed,
to wring tears, laughter, and two dollars each from a tired-business-man
audience.

Why, indeed, when the same slow fires that burned in Giaconda's
upslanted eyes and made the world her lover lay deep