ensity, her boring gaze so concentrated on the thing in hand
that her eyes seemed to cross.

Dawn broke upon her there, her hat still cockily awry, tears dried in
a vitrified gleaming down her cheeks. Beneath her flying fingers, a
sleeveless waistcoat was taking shape, a soldier's inner jacket against the
dam of trenches. At sunup it lay completed, spread out as if the first of
a pile. The first noises of the city began to rise remotely. A bell pealed
off somewhere. Day began to raise its conglomerate voice. On her knees
beside the couch there, the second waistcoat was already taking shape
beneath the cocksure needles.

The old pinkly moist look had come out in her face.

One million boys "out there" were needing chest-protectors!

III

ICE-WATER, PL--!

When the two sides of every story are told, Henry VIII. may establish an
alibi or two, Shylock and the public-school system meet over and melt that
too, too solid pound of flesh, and Xantippe, herself the sturdier man than
Socrates, give ready, lie to what is called the shrew in her. Landladies,
whole black-bombazine generations of them--oh, so long unheard!--may
rise in one Indictment of the Boarder: The scarred bureau-front and
match-scratched wall-paper; the empty trunk nailed to the floor in security
for the unpaid bill; cigarette-burnt sheets and the terror of sudden fire;
the silent newcomer in the third floor back hustled out one night in
handcuffs; the day-long sobs of the blond girl so suddenly terrified of
life-about-to-be and wringing her ringless hands in the fourth-floor
hall-room; the smell of escaping gas and the tightly packed keyhole; the
unsuspected flutes that lurk in boarders' trunks; towels, that querulous
and endless paean of the lodger; the high cost of liver and dried peaches,
of canned corn and round steak!

Tired bombazine procession, wrapped in the greasy odors of years of
carpet-sweeping and emptying slops, airing the gassy slit of room after the
coroner; and padding from floor to floor on a mission of towels and towels
and towels!

Sometimes climbing from floor to floor, a still warm supply of them looped
over one arm, Mrs. Kaufman, who wore bombazine, but unspotted and with
crisp net frills at the throat, and upon whose soft-looking face the years
had written their chirography in invisible ink, would sit suddenly, there
in the narrow gloom of her halls, head against the balustrade. Oftener than
not the Katz boy from the thi