“If you say another word about such stuff in front of that child, I’ll—­”

“Well, if you don’t want her to hear what she sees with her eyes all around her, come into the bedroom, then, and I can tell you something that’ll bring you to your senses.”

“What you can tell me I don’t want to hear.”

“You’re afraid.”

“I am, am I?”

“Yes.”

With a wrench of her entire body, Miss Lola Hassiebrock was across the room at three capacity strides, swung open a door there, and stood, head flung up and pressing back tears, her lips turned inward.

“All right, then—­tell—­”

After them, the immediately locked door resisting, Genevieve fell to batting the panels.

“Let me in!  Let me in!  You’re fussin’ about your beaux.  Ray Brownell has a long face, and Charley Cox has a red face—­red face—­red face!  Let me in!  In!”

After a while the ten-cent piece rolled from her clenched and knocking fist, scuttling and settling beneath the sink.  She rescued it and went out, lickety-clapping down the flight of rear stairs.

Silence descended over that kitchen, and a sooty dusk that almost obliterated the table, drawn out and cluttered after the manner of those who dine frowsily; the cold stove, its pots cloying, and a sink piled high with a task whose only ending is from meal to meal.

Finally that door swung open again; the wide-shouldered, slim-hipped silhouette of Miss Hassiebrock moved swiftly and surely through the kind of early darkness, finding out for itself a wall telephone hung in a small patch of hallway separating kitchen and front room.  Her voice came tight, as if it were a tense coil in her throat that she held back from bursting into hysteria.

“Give me Olive, two-one-o.”  The toe of her boot beat a quick tattoo.  “Stag?...  Say, get me Charley Cox.  He’s out in front or down in the grill or somewhere around.  Page him quick!  Important!” She grasped the nozzle of the instrument as she waited, breathing into it with her head thrown back.  “Hello—­Charley?  That you?  It’s me.  Loo ... Loo!  Are you deaf, honey?  What you doing?...  Oh, I got the blues, boy; honest I have.  Blue as a cat....  I don’t know—­just the indigoes.  Nothing much.  Ain’t lit up, are you, honey?...  Sure I will.  Don’t bring a crowd.  Just you and me.  I’ll walk down to Gessler’s drug-store and you can pick me up there....  Quit your kidding....  Ten minutes.  Yeh.  Good-by.”

* * * * *

Claxton Inn, slightly outside the city limits and certain of its decorums, stands back in a grove off a macadamized highway that is so pliant to tire that of summer nights, with tops thrown back and stars sown like lavish grain over a close sky and to a rushing breeze that presses the ears like an eager whisper, motor-cars, wild to catch up with the horizon, tear out that road—­a lightning-streak of them—­fearing neither penal law nor Dead Man’s Curve.