tch Marylin's blond loveliness--batiste--a whole
bolt of Brussels lace--had bitten the thumb of a policeman until it
hung, because he had surprised her horribly by stepping in through the
fire escape as she was unwinding the Brussels lace.

Another time, from her mother's trembling knee, she had seen her father
in a crowded courtroom standing between two uniforms, four fingers
peeping over each of his shoulders!

A uniform had shot her father from the underpinnings of the freight
car. Her mother had died with the phantom of one marching across her
delirium. Even opposite the long, narrow, and exceedingly respectable
rooming house in which she now dwelt a uniform had stood for several
days lately, contemplatively.

There was a menacing flicker of them almost across her eyeballs, so
close they lay to her experience, and yet how she could laugh when
Getaway made a feint toward the one on her beat, straightening up into
exaggerated decorum as the eye of the law, noting his approach, focused.

"Getaway," said Marylin, hop-skipping to keep up with him now, "why has
old Deady got his eye on you nowadays?"

Here Getaway flung his most Yankee-Doodle-Dandy manner, collapsing
inward at his extremely thin waistline, arms akimbo, his step designed
to be a mincing one, and his voice as soprano as it could be.

"You don't know the half of it, dearie. I've been slapping granny's
wrist, just like that. Ts-s-st!"

But somehow the laughter had run out of Marylin's voice. "Getaway," she
said, stopping on the sidewalk, so that when he answered his face must
be almost level with hers--"you're up to something again."

"I'm up to snuff," he said, and gyrated so that the bamboo cane looped a
circle.

She almost cried as she looked at him, so swift was her change of mood,
her lips trembling with the quiver of flesh that has been bruised.

"Oh, Getaway!" she said, "get away." And pushed him aside that she might
walk on. He did not know, nor did she, for that matter, the rustling
that was all of a sudden through her voice, but it was almost one of
those moments when she could make his eyes smart.

But what he said was, "For the luvagod, whose dead?"

"Me, in here," she said, very quickly, and placed her hand to her flimsy
blouse where her heart beat under it.

"Whadda you mean, dead?"

"Just dead, sometimes--as if something inside of me that can't get out
had--had just curled up and croaked."

The walk from the shirt factory wher