u--"

"Wide awake, too. With a start like I can give him in my business, you
'ain't got to worry Ruby 'ain't fixed herself with the man what she
chooses. To-morrow at Atlantic City all fixed I had it I should tell--"

"You!" she said, turning around in her chair to face him. "You--all along
you been fixing--"

He turned sheepish. "Ain't it fair, Lenie, in love and war and business a
man has got to scheme for what he wants out of life? Long enough it took
she should grow up. I knew all along once those two, each so full of life
and being young, got together it was natural what should happen. Mrs.
Kaufman! Lenie! Lenie!"

Prom two flights up, in through the open door and well above the harsh
sound of scrubbing, a voice curled down through the hallways and in. "Mrs.
Kaufman, ice-water--ple-ase!"

"Lenie," he said, his singing, tingling fingers closing over her wrist.

"Mrs. Kauf-man, ice-water, pl--"

With her free arm she reached and slammed the door, let her cheek lie to
the back of his hand, and closed her eyes.

IV

HERS _NOT_ TO REASON WHY

In the third winter of a world-madness, with Europe guzzling blood and wild
with the taste of it, America grew flatulent, stenching winds from the
battle-field blowing her prosperity.

Granaries filled to bursting tripled in value, and, in congested districts,
men with lean faces rioted when bread advanced a cent a loaf. Munition
factories, the fires of destruction smelting all night, worked three
shifts. Millions of shells for millions of dollars. Millions of lives for
millions of shells. A country feeding into the insatiable maw of war with
one hand, and with the other pouring relief-funds into coffers bombarded by
guns of its own manufacture--quelling the wound with a finger and widening
it with a knife up the cuff.

In France, women with blue faces and too often with the pulling lips of
babes at dry breasts, learned the bitter tasks of sewing closed the coat
sleeves and of cutting off and hemming the trousers leg at the knee.

In America, women new to the feel of fur learned to love it and not
question whence it came. Men of small affairs, suddenly earthquaked to the
crest of the great tidal wave of new market-values, went drunk with wealth.

In New York, where so many great forces of a great country coagulate, the
face of the city photographed would have been a composite of fat and jowl,
rouge and heavy lip--satiated yet insatiate, the head double-chinn