th a toothpick stuck in each
half (also Ada's touch, the toothpicks).

She moved rather pussily, he thought, sometimes her fair cheeks
quivering slightly to the vibration of her walk, as if they had jelled.
And, too, there was something rather snug and plump in the way her
little hands with the eight dimples moved about things, laying the slabs
of Swiss cheese, unstacking cups.

"No, only seven cups, Ada. Nicky--ain't going to be home to supper."

"Oh," she said, "excuse me! I--I--thought--silly--" and looked up at him
to deny that it mattered.

"Isn't that what you said this morning, Nicky?" Poor Sara, she almost
failed herself then because her voice ended in quite a dry click in her
throat.

He stood watching the resumed unstacking of the cups, each with its
crisp little grate against its neighbor.

"One," said Ada, "two-three-four-five-six--seven!"

He looked very long and lean and his darkly nervous self, except that he
dilly-dallied on his heels like a much-too-tall boy not wanting to look
foolish.

"If Miss Ada will provide another cup and saucer, I think I'll stay
home."

"As you will," said Sara, disappearing into the dining room with the
mound of salad and the basket of sugar-kissed dates.

She put them down rather hastily when she got there, because, sillily
enough, she thought, for the merest instant, she was going to faint.

* * * * *

The week that Judge Turkletaub tried his first case in Court of General
Sessions--a murder case, toward which his criminal-law predilection
seemed so inevitably to lead him, his third child, a little daughter
with lovely creamy skin against slightly too curly hair, was lying, just
two days old, in a blue-and-white nursery with an absurd border of blue
ducks waddling across the wallpaper.

Ada, therefore, was not present at this inaugural occasion of his first
trial. But each of the two weeks of its duration, in a first-row bench
of the privileged, so that her gaze was almost on a dotted line with her
son's, sat Sara Turkletaub, her hands crossed over her waistline, her
bosom filling and waning and the little jet folderols on her bonnet
blinking. Tears had their way with her, prideful, joyful at her son's
new estate, sometimes bitterly salt at the life in the naked his eyes
must look upon.

Once, during the recital of the defendant, Sara almost seemed to bleed
her tears, so poignantly terrible they came, scorching her eyes of a