“I’ve heard,” said Jessie in the tones of the oracle, “that drinking alone is a pernicious habit.  No, I don’t think I feel like playing this evening.  If we are going to reform we may as well abandon the evil habit of banjo-playing, too.”

She took up a book and sat in her little willow rocker on the other side of the table.  Neither of them spoke for half an hour.

And then Bob laid down his paper and got up with a strange, absent look on his face and went behind her chair and reached over her shoulders, taking her hands in his, and laid his face close to hers.

In a moment to Jessie the walls of the seine-hung room vanished, and she saw the Sullivan County hills and rills.  Bob felt her hands quiver in his as he began the verse from old Omar: 

    “Come, fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring
     The Winter Garment of Repentance fling: 
     The Bird of Time has but a little way
     To fly—­and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing!”

And then he walked to the table and poured a stiff drink of Scotch into a glass.

But in that moment a mountain breeze had somehow found its way in and blown away the mist of the false Bohemia.

Jessie leaped and with one fierce sweep of her hand sent the bottle and glasses crashing to the floor.  The same motion of her arm carried it around Bob’s neck, where it met its mate and fastened tight.

“Oh, my God, Bobbie—­not that verse—­I see now.  I wasn’t always such a fool, was I?  The other one, boy—­the one that says:  ’Remould it to the Heart’s Desire.’  Say that one—­’to the Heart’s Desire.’”

“I know that one,” said Bob.  “It goes: 

   “’Ah!  Love, could you and I with Him conspire
     To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire
     Would not we—­’”

“Let me finish it,” said Jessie.

   “’Would not we shatter it to bits—­and then
     Remould it nearer to the Heart’s Desire!’”

“It’s shattered all right,” said Bob, crunching some glass under his heel.

In some dungeon below the accurate ear of Mrs. Pickens, the landlady, located the smash.

“It’s that wild Mr. Babbitt coming home soused again,” she said.  “And he’s got such a nice little wife, too!”

THE PENDULUM

“Eighty-first street—­let ’em out, please,” yelled the shepherd in blue.

A flock of citizen sheep scrambled out and another flock scrambled aboard.  Ding-ding!  The cattle cars of the Manhattan Elevated rattled away, and John Perkins drifted down the stairway of the station with the released flock.

John walked slowly toward his flat.  Slowly, because in the lexicon of his daily life there was no such word as “perhaps.”  There are no surprises awaiting a man who has been married two years and lives in a flat.  As he walked John Perkins prophesied to himself with gloomy and downtrodden cynicism the foregone conclusions of the monotonous day.