grandly as she ran into its tulle.
It closed around and around her.

V

GOLDEN FLEECE

How saving a dispensation it is that men do not carry in their hearts
perpetual ache at the pain of the world, that the body-thuds of the
drink-crazed, beating out frantic strength against cell doors, cannot
penetrate the beatitude of a mother bending, at that moment, above a crib.
Men can sit in club windows while, even as they sit, are battle-fields
strewn with youth dying, their faces in mud. While men are dining where
there are mahogany and silver and the gloss of women's shoulders, are men
with kick-marks on their shins, ice gluing shut their eyes, and lashed with
gale to some ship-or-other's crow's-nest. Women at the opera, so fragrant
that the senses swim, sit with consciousness partitioned against a
sweating, shuddering woman in some forbidding, forbidden room, hacking open
a wall to conceal something red-stained. One-half of the world does not
know or care how the other half lives or dies.

When, one summer, July came in like desert wind, West Cabanne Terrace and
that part of residential St. Louis that is set back in carefully conserved,
grove-like lawns did not sip its iced limeades with any the less
refreshment because, down-town at the intersection of Broadway and West
Street, a woman trundling a bundle of washing in an old perambulator
suddenly keeled of heat, saliva running from her mouth-corners.

At three o'clock, that hour when so often a summer's day reaches its stilly
climax and the heat-dance becomes a thing visible, West Cabanne Terrace and
its kind slip into sheerest and crepiest de Chine, click electric fans to
third speed, draw green shades, and retire for siesta.

At that same hour, in the Popular Store, where Broadway and West Street
intersect, one hundred and fifty salesgirls--jaded sentinels for a
public that dares not venture down, loll at their counters and after the
occasional shopper, relax deeper to limpidity.

At the jewelry counter, a crystal rectangle facing broadside the main
entrance and the bleached and sun-grilled street without, Miss Lola
Hassiebrock, salient among many and with Olympian certainty of self, lifted
two Junoesque arms like unto the handles of a vase, held them there in the
kind of rigidity that accompanies a yawn, and then let them flop.

"Oh-h-h-h, God bless my soul!" she said.

Miss Josie Beemis, narrowly constricted between shoulders that barely
sloped off fro