g what we want and both of us getting, older and our work not done.
Oh, I love you, Nancy--if there was any hope at all I'd go down on my
knees to ask you to keep on but there isn't--they've beaten us--they've
beaten us--all the fat old people who told us we were too poor and
too young. All we do is go on like this both of us getting worked up
whenever we see each other and both of us hurting each other and nothing
happening--Oh, Nancy, I thought we could help each other always and now
we can't even [Illustration: AND THEN THE QUEER MAN HAD GONE OUT OF THE
DOOR] a little any more. You remember when we promised that if either of
us stopping loving each other we'd tell?"

Nancy is very silent and rather white.

"Yes, Ollie."

"Well, Nancy?"

"Well--"

They look at each other as if they were watching each other burn.

"Good-by darling, darling, darling!" says Ollie through lips like a
marionette's.

Then Nancy feels him take hold of her again--the arms of somebody else
in Oliver's body--and a cold mouth hurting her cheek--and still she
cannot speak. And then the queer man who was walking up and down so
disturbingly has gone out of the door.

XVI

Oliver finds himself walking along a long street in a city. It is not a
distinguished street by any means--there are neither plate-glass shops
nor 'residences' on it--just an ordinary street of little stores and
small houses and occasionally an apartment building named for a Pullman
car. In a good many houses the lights are out already--it is nearly
eleven o'clock and this part of St. Louis goes to bed early--only the
drugstores and the moving-picture theatres are still flaringly awake.
His eyes read the sign that he passes mechanically, "Dr. Edwin K.
Buffinton--Chiropractor," "McMurphy and Kane's," "The Rossiter," with
its pillars that look as if they had been molded out of marbled soap.

Thought. Memory. Pain. Pain pressing down on his eyeballs like an iron
thumb, twisting wires around his forehead tighter and tighter till it's
funny the people he passes don't see the patterns they make on his skin.

Somebody talking in his mind, quite steadily and flatly, repeating and
repeating itself like a piece of cheap music played over and over
again on a scratched phonograph record, talking in the voice that is
a composite of a dozen voices; a fat man comfortable on a club lounge
laying down the law as if he were carefully smearing the shine out
of something brilliant