'May I ask,' she said, with some of the ice in her tones, 'whether I am to be included in your sudden spasm of goodness? If not, I'll make one for myself. It's rather chilly this evening, for some reason.'
'Oh, come now, Jess,' said Bob good-naturedly, 'don't be too rough on me. Help yourself, by all means. There's no danger of your overdoing it. But I thought there was with me; and that's why I quit. Have yours, and then let's get out the banjo and try over that new quickstep.'
'I've heard,' said Jessie in the tones of the oracle, 'that drinking alone is a pernicious habit. No, I don't think I feel like playing this evening. If we are going to reform we may as well abandon the evil habit of banjo-playing, too.'
She took up a book and sat in her little willow rocker on the other side of the table. Neither of them spoke for half an hour.
And then Bob laid down his paper and got up with a strange, absent look on his face and went behind her chair and reached over her shoulders, taking her hands in his, and laid his face close to hers.
In a moment to Jessie the walls of the seine-hung room vanished, and she saw the Sullivan County hills and rills. Bob felt her hands quiver in his as he began the verse from old Omar:
'Come, fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring The Winter Garment of Repentance fling: The Bird of Time has but a little way To fly--and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing!'
And then he walked to the table and poured a stiff drink of Scotch into a glass.
But in that moment a mountain breeze had somehow found its way in and blown away the mist of the false Bohemia.
Jessie leaped and with one fierce sweep of her hand sent the bottle and glasses crashing to the floor. The same motion of her arm carried it around Bob's neck, where it met its mate and fastened tight.
'Oh, my God, Bobbie--not that verse--I see now. I wasn't always such a fool, was I? The other one, boy--the one that says: 'Remould it to the Heart's Desire.' Say that one--'to the Heart's Desire.''
'I know that one,' said Bob. 'It goes:'
''Ah! Love, could you and I with Him conspire To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire Would not we--''
'Let me finish it,' said Jessie.
''Would not we shatter it to bits--and then Remould it nearer to the Heart's Desire!''
'It's shattered all right,' said Bob, crunching some glass under his heel.
In some dungeon below the accurate ear of Mrs. Pickens, the landlady, located the smash.
'It's that wild Mr. Babbitt coming home soused again,' she said. 'And he's got such a nice little wife, too!'
'Eighty-first street--let 'em out, please,' yelled the shepherd in blue.
A flock of citizen sheep scrambled out and another flock scrambled aboard. Ding-ding! The cattle cars of the Manhattan Elevated rattled away, and John Perkins drifted down the stairway of the station with the released flock.
John walked slowly toward his flat. Slowly, because in the lexicon of his daily life there was no such word as 'perhaps.' There are no surprises awaiting a man who has been married two years and lives in a flat. As he walked John Perkins prophesied to himself with gloomy and downtrodden cynicism the foregone conclusions of the monotonous day.
Katy would meet him at the door with a kiss flavored with cold cream and butter-scotch. He would remove his coat, sit upon a macadamized lounge and read, in the evening paper, of Russians and Japs slaughtered by the deadly linotype. For dinner there would be pot roast, a salad flavored with a dressing warranted not to crack or injure the leather, stewed rhubarb and the bottle of strawberry marmalade blushing at the certificate of chemical purity on its label. After dinner Katy would show him the new patch in her crazy quilt that the iceman had cut for her off the end of his four-in- hand. At half-past seven they would spread newspapers over the furniture to catch the pieces of plastering that fell when the fat man in the flat overhead began to take his physical culture exercises. Exactly at eight Hickey--Mooney, of the vaudeville team (unbooked) in the flat across the hall, would yield to the gentle influence of delirium tremens and begin to overturn chairs under the delusion that Hammerstein was pursuing them with a five-hundred- dollar-a-week contract. Then the gent at the window across the air- shaft would get out his flute; the nightly gas leak would steal forth to frolic in the highways; the dumbwaiter would slip off its trolley; the janitor would drive Mrs. Zanowitski's five children once more across the Yalu, the lady with the champagne shoes and the Skye terrier would trip downstairs and paste her Thursday name over her bell and letter-box--and the evening routine of the Frogmore flats would be under way.
John Perkins knew these things would happen. And he knew that at a quarter past eight he would summon his nerve and reach for his hat, and that his wife would deliver this speech in a querulous tone:
'Now, where are you going, I'd like to know, John Perkins?'
'Thought I'd drop up to McCloskey's,' he would answer, 'and play a game or two of pool with the fellows.'
Of late such had been John Perkins's habit. At ten or eleven he would return. Sometimes Katy would be asleep; sometimes waiting up, ready to melt in the crucible of her ire a little more gold plating from the wrought steel chains of matrimony. For these things Cupid will have to answer when he stands at the bar of justice with his victims from the Frogmore flats.
To-night John Perkins encountered a tremendous upheaval of the commonplace when he reached his door. No Katy was there with her affectionate, confectionate kiss. The three rooms seemed in portentous disorder. All about lay her things in confusion. Shoes in the middle of the floor, curling tongs, hair bows, kimonos, powder box, jumbled together on dresser and chairs--this was not Katy's way. With a sinking heart John saw the comb with a curling cloud of her brown hair among its teeth. Some unusual hurry and perturbation must have possessed her, for she always carefully placed these combings in the little blue vase on the mantel to be some day formed into the coveted feminine 'rat.'
Hanging conspicuously to the gas jet by a string was a folded paper. John seized it. It was a note from his
