“Johnnie, what small feet and little hands you have ... you’re a regular aristocrat.”

* * * * *

A pause.

I give her a poem written to her.  She reads it, letting her knife stick in a half-peeled potato.  She looks up at me out of heavy-lidded eyes.

* * * * *

“I believe you’re falling in love with me.”

I trembled, answered nothing, was silent.

“Kiss me!”

Seeing me so a-tremble, she obeyed her own injunction.  With slow deliberation she crushed her lips, full and voluptuous, into mine.  The warmth of them seemed to catch hold of something deep down in me, and, with exquisite painfulness, draw it out.  Blinded with emotion, I clutched close to her.  She laughed.  I put one hand over her full breast as infants do.  She pushed me back.

“There, that’s enough for one day—­a promise of sweets to come!” and she laughed again, with a hearty purr like a cat that has a mouse at its mercy.

She rose and carried in the pan of potatoes we had just finished peeling.  And I saw her sturdy, but not unshapely ankles going from me as she went up the steps from the yard, her legs gleaming white through her half-silk hose (that were always coming down, and that she was always twisting up, just under her knees, before my abashed eyes).  She wore shoes much too little for her plump feet ... and, when not abroad, let them yawn open unbuttoned.  And her plump body was alive and bursting through her careless, half-fastened clothes.

She sang with a deep sultriness of voice as she walked away with the pan of potatoes.

* * * * *

“You ought to see my Florrie read books!” exclaimed the mother.

Flora did read a lot ... but chiefly the erotic near-society novels that Belford used to print....

“Yes, she’s a smart girl, she is.”

And the father....

“I won’t work till the unions get better conditions for a man.  I won’t be no slave to no man.”

* * * * *

One sultry afternoon I went into the restaurant and found Flora away.  Poignantly disappointed, I asked where she was.

“—­Gone on a trip!” her mother explained, without explaining.

From time to time Flora went on “trips.”

* * * * *

And one morning, several mornings, Flora was not there to serve at the breakfast table ... and I was hurt when I learned that she had gone back to Newark to live, and had left no word for me.  Her father told me she “had gone back to George,” meaning her never-seen husband from whom she evidently enjoyed intervals of separation and grass-widowhood.

I was puzzled and hurt indeed, because she had not even said good-bye to me.  But soon came this brief note from her: 

“Dearest Boy:—­

Do come up to Newark and see me some afternoon.  And come more than once.  Bring your Tennyson that you was reading aloud to me.  I love to hear you read poetry.  I think you are a dear and want to see more of you.  But I suppose you have already forgotten

Your loving