“Good night, Gert.”

Miss Dobriner bared her teeth to a smile and closed her lips again before she spoke.  “Good night—­madam.”

Then she went out, clicking the door behind her.  Through the mauve-colored swinging-door and scarcely a clock-tick later entered Mr. Alphonse Michelson, spick, light-footed, slim.

“Charley’s left with the black lace, madam.”

It was as if Madam Moores suddenly threw off the husk of the day.  “Tired, Phonzie?”

He ran a hand across his silk hair and glanced about.  “Everybody gone?”

“Yes.”

He reached for his hat and cane and a pair of untried gray gloves atop them.  “I sent the yellow taffeta out on a C.O.D.  That gold buckle she wanted on the shoulder cost her just twenty bucks more.”

“Good!”

He fitted on his hat carefully and snapped his gloves across his palm.  “Well, I’m off, madam.”

She adjusted her hat in a simulation of indifference.  “Like to come up to the flat for supper and—­and go over the books, Phonzie?”

“Huh?”

“There’s plenty for two and—­and we could kind of go over things.”

He twirled his cane.  “Oh, I—­I’m running up there too often, sponging off you.”

“Sponging!  Like I’d ask you if I didn’t want you!”

“I been up there sponging off you three times this week.  Anyways, I’m—­”

“Don’t I always just give you pot luck?”

“Yes, but you’ll think afterwhile that I got you mixed up with my meal-ticket.”

A sensitive seepage of blood rushed over Madam Moores’s nervous face, stinging it.  “Of course, if you won’t want to come!”

“Don’t want to come!  A fellow that’s never had a snap like your cozy corner in his life—­”

“Of course if—­if you got a date with one of—­of the models or something.”

“I never said that, did I?”

“Well, get that sponging idea out of your head, Phonzie.  There’s always plenty for two in my cupboard.  Like I says the other night, what’s the use being able to afford my little flat if I can’t get some pleasure out of it?”

“It sure looks good to this hall-room Johnnie.”

She gathered her gloves and her black silk handbag.  “Then come, Phonzie,” she said, “I’m going to take you home.”  And her throat might have been lined with fur.

They went out together, locking the doors behind them, and into an evening as soft as silk and full of stars.

Along the wide up-town street the human tide flowed fast and as if thaw had set in, releasing it from the bondage of winter.  Girls in light wraps and without hats loitered in the white flare of drugstore lights.  Here and there a brown stoop bloomed with a boarder or two.  In front of Seligman’s florist shop, which occupied the ground floor of Madam Moores’s dressmaking establishment, Alphonse Michelson paused for a moment in the flare of its decorative show-window and flecked at his hatband with sheer untried handkerchief.