“Let the town once label a man with drinkin’, and it’s hard to get justice for him.”

“It took Martha and Eda and Gessler’s hired girl to hold her in bed with the pain.”

“Yes, yes,” said Mrs. Scogin, sucking in her words and her eyes seeming to strain through the present; “once label a man with drinkin’.”

Kittie Scogin Bevins entered then through a rain of bead portieres.  Insistently blond, her loosed-out hair newly dry and flowing down over a very spotted and very baby-blue kimono, there was something soft-fleshed about her, a not unappealing saddle of freckles across her nose, the eyes too light but set in with a certain feline arch to them.

“Hello, Han!”

“Hello, Kittie!”

“Snowing?”

“No.”

“Been washing my hair to show it a good time.  One month in this dump and they’d have to hire a hearse to roll me back to Forty-second Street in.”

“This ain’t nothing.  Wait till we begin to get snowed in!”

“I know.  Say, you c’n tell me nothing about this tank I dunno already.  I was buried twenty-two years in it.  Move over, ma.”

She fitted herself into the lower curl of the couch, crossing her hands at the back of her head, drawing up her feet so that, for lack of space, her knees rose to a hump.

“What’s new in Deadtown, Han?”

“‘New’!  This dump don’t know we got a new war.  They think it’s the old Civil one left over.”

“Burkhardt’s been made a deacon, Kittie.”

“O Lord! ma, forget it!” Mrs. Scogin Bevins threw out her hands to Mrs. Burkhardt in a wide gesture, indicating her mother with a forefinger, then with it tapping her own brow.  “Crazy as a loon!  Bats!”

“If your father had—­”

“Ma, for Gossakes—­”

“You talk to Kittie, Hanna.  My girls won’t none of ’em listen to me no more.  I tell ’em they’re fightin’ over my body before it’s dead for this house and the one on Ludlow Street.  It’s precious little for ’em to be fightin’ for before I’m dead, but if not for it, I’d never be gettin’ these visits from a one of ’em.”

“Ma!”

“I keep tellin’ her, Kittie, to stay home.  New York ain’t no place for a divorced woman to set herself right with the Lord.”

“Ma, if you don’t quit raving and clear on up to bed, I’ll pack myself out to-night yet, and then you’ll have a few things to set right with the Lord.  Go on up, now.”

“I—­”

“Go on—­you hear?”

Mrs. Scogin went then, tiredly and quite bent forward, toward a flight of stairs that rose directly from the parlor, opened a door leading up into them, the frozen breath of unheated regions coming down.

“Quick—­close that door, ma!”

“Come to see a body, Hanna, when she ain’t here.  She won’t stay at home, like a God-fearin’ woman ought to.”

“Light the gas-heater up there, if you expect me to come to bed.  I’m used to steam-heated flats, not barns.”