ning contents of a tumbler had been flung in.
Cigarette stubs floated. A pasteboard cylindrical box, labeled "Sodium
Bi-carbonate," had a spoon stuck in it. A rubber glove drooped deadly
over the sink edge.

On the second that he stood in that smelling fog, probably for no longer
than it took the swinging door to settle, something of sickness rushed
over Nicholas. The unaired odors of old foods. Those horrific things on
the line. The oil that had so obviously been sopped up with bread. The
old beer, edged in grease. Something of sickness and a panoramic flash
of things absurdly, almost unreasonably irrelevant.

Snow, somewhere back in his memory. A frozen silence of it that was
clean and thin to the smell. The ridges in the rattan with which his
father had whipped him the night after the Chinese laundry. The fine
white head of the dean of the law school. His mother baking for Friday
night in a blue-and-white gingham apron that enveloped her. Red
curls--some one's--somewhere. The string of tiny Oriental pearls that
rose and fell with the little pouter-pigeon swell of a bosom. Pretty
perturbation. His cousin's sister-in-law, Ada. A small hole in a
pink-silk stocking, peeping like a little rising sun above the heel of a
rubbed gilt slipper. Josie's slipper.

Something seemed suddenly to rise in Nicholas, with the quick
capillarity of water boiling over.

The old familiar star-spangled red over which Sara had time after time
laid sedative hand against his seeing, sprang out. The pit of his
passion was bottomless, into which he was tumbling with the icy laughter
of breaking glass.

Then he struck out against the swinging door so that it ripped outward
with a sough of stale air, striking Josie Drew, as she approached it
from the room side, so violently that her teeth bit down into her lips
and the tattling blood began to flow.

"Nicky! It's a mistake. I thought--my sister--It got so late--you
wouldn't go. Go now! The key--turning--Nervous--silly--mistake. Go--"

He laughed, something exhilarant in his boiling over, and even in her
sudden terror of him she looked at his bare teeth and felt the unnice
beauty of the storm.

"Nicky," she half cried, "don't be--foolish! I--"

And then he struck her across the lip so that her teeth cut in again.

"There is some one coming here to-night," he said, with his smile still
very white.

She sat on the couch, trying to bravado down her trembling.

"And what if there is? He'l