iling agitation
had long ago ceased since the shame of the raided room above, and Muggs,
in his absurd messenger's suit, and Monkey marching down the three
flights to the clanking of steel at the wrists.

There were new footsteps now. Steps that she had also learned to know,
but pleasantly. They marched out so regularly of mornings, invariably
just as she was about to hook her skirtband or pull on her stockings.
They came home so patly again at seven, about as she sat herself down to
a bit of sewing or washing-out. They went to bed so pleasantly. Thud,
on the floor, and then, after the expectant interval of unlacing, thud
again. They were companionable, those footsteps, almost like reverential
marching on the grave of her heart.

Marylin reversed the rosette, and as the light began to go sat down
beside her window, idly, looking up. There was the star point in her
patch of sky, eating its way right through the purple like a diamond,
and her ache over it was so tangible that it seemed to her she could
almost lift the hurt out of her heart, as if it were a little imprisoned
bird. And as it grew darker there came two stars, and three, and nine,
and finally the sixty hundred.

Then from the zig of the fire escape above, before it twisted down into
the zag of hers, there came to Marylin, through the medley of city
silences and the tears in her heart, this melody, on a jew's-harp:

If it had any key at all, it was in the mood of Chopin's Nocturne in D
flat major. A little sigh for the death of a day, a sob for the beauty
of that death, and the throb of an ecstasy for the new day not yet born.

Looking up against the sheer wall of the vertical city, on the ledge of
fire escape above hers, and in the yellow patch of light thrown out from
the room behind, a youth, with his knees hunched up under his chin, and
his mouth and hand moving at cross purposes, was playing the harmonica.

Wide apart were his eyes, and blue, so that while she gazed up, smiling,
as he gazed down, smiling, it was almost as if she ran up the fire
escape through the long clear lanes of those eyes, for a dip into the
little twin lakes at the back of them.

And--why, didn't you know?--there was a lift of cowlick to the right
side of his front hair, as he sat there playing in the twilight, that
was exactly the shape of an apostrophe!

THE SMUDGE

In the bleak little graveyard of Hattie Bertch's dead hopes, dead loves,
and dead ecstasies, more