“You got the head for the big things, and that’s what counts.”

“That’s why, when you say you can’t line up alongside of me, it’s no excuse.”

“I—­I mean it.”

“Just because I got a head for designing doesn’t make me a nine days’ wonder.  Why don’t you—­you come right out and say what you mean, Phonzie?”

“Why, I—­I don’t even know how to talk to a woman like you, madam.  La-La girls have always been my pace.”

“I know, Phonzie, and I—­I ain’t blaming you.  A slick-looking fellow like you can skylark around as he pleases and don’t need to have time for—­the overworked, tired-out ones like me.”

“Madam, I never dreamed—­”

“Dreamed!  Phonzie, I—­I’ve got no shame if I tell you, but, God! how many nights I—­I’ve lain right here on this couch dreaming of—­of—­”

“Well?”

“Of you and me, Phonzie, hitting it off together.”

“Madam!”

Her head burrowed deeper in her arms, her voice muffed in their depth.

“Madam!”

“How many times I’ve dreamed, Phonzie.  You and me, real partners in the business and—­and in everything.  Us in a little home together, one of the five-room flats down on the next floor, with a life-size kitchen and a life-size dining-room and—­and a life-size—­Aw, Phonzie, you—­you’ll think I’m crazy.”

“Madam, why, madam, I just don’t know.”

“Them’s the dreams a silly old thing like me, that never had nothing but work and—­and nothing else in her life, can lay right here on this couch, night after night, and—­Gawd!  I—­I bet you think I—­I’m just crazy, Phonzie.”

For answer he leaned over and took her small figure in his arms, wiping away with his sheer untried handkerchief the tears; but fresh ones sashayed down her face and flowed over her words.

“Phonzie, tell me, do you—­do you—­think—­”

He held her closer.  “Sure, madam, I do.”

* * * * *

On the wings of a twelvemonth, spring had come around again and the taste of summer was like poppy-leaves between the teeth, and the perennial open shirtwaists and open street-cars bloomed, even as the distant larkspur in the distant field.  At six o’clock with darkness came a spattering of rain, heavy single drops that fell each with its splotch, exuding from the asphalt the warming smell of thaw.  Then came wind, right high-tempered, too, slanting the rain and scudding it and blowing pedestrians’ skirts forward and their umbrellas inside outward.  Mr. Alphonse Michelson fitted his hand like a vizor over his eyes and peered out into the wet dusk.  Lights gleamed and were reflected in the dark pool of rain-swept asphalt.  Passers-by hurried for shelter and bent into the wind.

In Madam Moores’s establishment, enlarged during the twelvemonth to twice its floor space, the business day waned and died; in the workrooms the whir of machines sank into the quiet maw of darkness; in the showrooms the shower lights, all but a single cluster, blinked out.  Alphonse Michelson slid into a tan, rain-proof coat, turning up the collar and buttoning across the flap, then fell to pacing the thick-nap carpet.