uaintness" seem to be that it is chopped up into as many little
partitions as a roulette wheel and that all food has to be carried up
from a cellar that imparts even to orange marmalade a faint persuasive
odor of somebody else's wash. Still, during the last eight months, the
Gondolier has been a radical bookstore devoted to bloody red pamphlets,
a batik shop full of strange limp garments ornamented with decorative
squiggles, and a Roumanian Restaurant called "The Brodska" whose menu
seemed to consist almost entirely of old fish and maraschino cherries.

The wispy little woman from Des Moines who conducts the Gondolier at
present in a series of timid continual flutters at actually leading the
life of the Bohemian untamed, and who gives all the young hungry-looking
men extra slices of toast because any one of them might be Vachel
Lindsay in disguise, will fail in another six weeks and then the
Gondolier may turn into anything from a Free Verse Tavern to a Meeting
Hall for the Friends of Slovak Freedom. But at present, the tea is much
too good for the price in spite of its inescapable laundry tang,
and there is a flat green bowl full of Japanese iris bulbs in the
window--the second of which pleases Mrs. Severance and the first Ted.

Besides like most establishments on the verge of bankruptcy, it is such
a quiet place to talk--the only other two people in it are a boy with
startled hair and an orange smock and a cigaretty girl called Tommy, and
she is far too busy telling him that that dream about wearing a necklace
of flying-fish shows a dangerous inferiority complex even to comment
caustically on strangers from uptown who _will_ intrude on the dear
Village.

"Funny stuff--dreams," says Ted uneasily, catching at overheard phrases
for a conversational jumping-off place. His mind, always a little on
edge now with work and bad feeding, has been too busy since they came in
comparing Rose Severance with Elinor Piper, and wondering why, when one
is so like a golden-skinned August pear and the other a branch of winter
blackberries against snow just fallen, it is not as good but somehow
warmer to think of the first against your touch than the second, to
leave him wholly at ease.

"Yes--funny stuff," Mrs. Severance's voice is musically quiet. "And
then you tell them to people who pretend to know all about what they
mean--and then--" She shrugs shoulders at the Freudian two across the
shoulder-high partition.

"But you don't be