Floss yawned again, disinterestedly, and folded her kimono about her.

“Go as far as you like.  Only don’t put things back in my closet so’s I can’t ever find ’em again.  I wish you’d press that blue skirt.  And wash out the Georgette crepe waist.  I might need it.”

The blouse, and skirt, and stockings under her arm, Rose went back to the kitchen to prepare her mother’s breakfast tray.  Wafted back to her came the acrid odour of Pa’s matutinal pipe, and the accustomed bickering between Al and Floss over the possession of the bathroom.

“What do you think this is, anyway?  A Turkish bath?”

“Shave in your own room!”

Between Floss and Al there existed a feud that lifted only when a third member of the family turned against either of them.  Immediately they about-faced and stood united against the offender.

Pa was the first to demand breakfast, as always.  Very neat, was Pa, and fussy, and strangely young looking to be the husband of the grey-haired, parchment-skinned woman who lay in the front bedroom.  Pa had two manias:  the movies, and a passion for purchasing new and complicated household utensils—­cream-whippers, egg-beaters, window-clamps, lemon-squeezers, silver-polishers.  He haunted department store basements in search of them.

He opened his paper now and glanced at the head-lines and at the Monday morning ads.  “I see the Fair’s got a spring housecleaning sale.  They advertise a new kind of extension curtain rod.  And Scouro, three cakes for a dime.”

“If you waste one cent more on truck like that,” Rose protested, placing his breakfast before him, “when half the time I can’t make the housekeeping money last through the week!”

“Your ma did it.”

“Fourteen years ago liver wasn’t thirty-two cents a pound,” retorted Rose, “and besides—­”

“Scramble ’em!” yelled Al, from the bedroom, by way of warning.

There was very little talk after that.  The energies of three of them were directed toward reaching the waiting desk or counter on time.  The energy of one toward making that accomplishment easy.  The front door slammed once—­that was Pa, on his way; slammed again—­Al.  Floss rushed into the dining-room fastening the waist-band of her skirt, her hat already on.  Rose always had a rather special breakfast for Floss.  Floss posed as being a rather special person.  She always breakfasted last, and late.  Floss’s was a fastidiousness which shrinks at badly served food, a spotted table-cloth, or a last year’s hat, while it overlooks a rent in an undergarment or the accumulated dust in a hairbrush.  Her blouse was of the sheerest.  Her hair shone in waves about her delicate checks.  She ate her orange, and sipped her very special coffee, and made a little face over her egg that had been shirred in the oven or in some way highly specialised.  Then the front door slammed again—­a semi-slam, this time.  Floss never did quite close a door.  Rose followed her down the hall, shut and bolted it, Chicago fashion.  The sick woman in the front bedroom had dropped into one of her fitful morning dozes.  At eight o’clock the little flat was very still.