“You wheel him down and in on her, Gert.”

She stiffened with a new diffidence.  “No, no.  It’s your surprise.”

“You done all the work on the job as much as me, and it’s half your present, anyways.  You roll him down the hall and stand next to her till she wakes up.  She’s a tight little sleeper, but if she don’t wake soon I’ll drop a book or something.  Go on, Gert, roll it in.”

“No, no, Phonzie.  You and her have your fun out alone.  It’s your fun, anyways, not mine.  This piece of rolling-stock will roll herself along home now.”

“Aw, now—­”

“Anyways, I’m dead.  Look what a rag I am!  Look at the hem of this skirt!  The next time I do a crazy thing like walk from Brooklyn, I want to be burned in oil.”

“Now, Gert, stick around and I’ll send you home in a cab.”

But she was out and past him craning her neck backward through the aperture of the open door.  “Go to it, Phonzie!  It’s your fun, anyways.  Yours and hers.  S’long!”

He had already begun his triumphant passage down the hallway, and on her couch among her pillows Madam Moores closed her eyes in a simulation of sleep and against the tears that scalded her lids.

In a south-bound car Gertie Dobriner found a seat well toward the front.  Across the aisle a day laborer on a night debauch threw her a watery stare and a thick-tongued, thick-brogued remark.  A char-woman with a newspaper bundle hugged under one arm dozed in the seat alongside, her head lolling from shoulder to shoulder.  Raindrops had long since dried on the window-pane.  Gertie Dobriner cupped her chin in her palm and gazed out at the quiet street and the shuttered shops hurtling past.

Twice the conductor touched her shoulder, his hand outstretched for fare.  She sprang about, fumbling in her purse for a coin, but with difficulty, because through the hot blur of her tears she could only grope ineffectually.  When she finally found a five-cent piece, a tear had wiggle-waggled down her cheek and fell, splotching the back of her glove.

Across the aisle the day laborer leaned to her batting at the hen pheasant’s tail in her hat, and a cold, alcoholic tear dripping from the corner of his own eye.

“Cheer up, my gir-rl,” he said, through a beard like old moss—­“cheer up and be a spor-r-rt!”

HOCHENHEIMER OF CINCINNATI

When Mound City began to experience the growing-pains of a Million Club, a Louisiana Exposition, and a block-long Public Library, she spread Westward Ho!—­like a giant stretching and flinging out his great legs.

When rooming-houses and shoe-factories began to shove and push into richly curtained brown-stone-front Pine Street, reluctant papas, with urgent wives and still more urgent daughters, sold at a loss and bought white-stone fronts in restricted West End districts.