," one of the men
called these stories. He was in the theatrical business. The men were,
for the most part, a rather drab-looking lot. Colourless, good-natured,
open-handed. Almost imperceptibly the Crowd began to use Ray as a target
for a certain raillery. It wasn't particularly ill-natured, and Ray did
not resent it.

"Oh, come on, Ray! Don't be a wet blanket.... Lookit him! I bet he's
thinking about those smoked glasses again. Eh, Atwater? He's in a daze
about that new rim that won't show on the glasses. Come out of it! First
thing you know you'll lose your little Cora."

There was little danger of that. Though Cora flirted mildly with the
husbands of the other girls in the Crowd (they all did) she was true to
Ray.

Ray was always talking of building a little place of their own. People
were beginning to move farther and farther north, into the suburbs.

"Little place of your own," Ray would say, "that's the only way to live.
Then you're not paying it all out in rent to the other feller. Little
place of your own. That's the right idear."

But as the years went by, and Ray earned more and more money, he and
Cora seemed to be getting farther and farther away from the right idear.
In the $28.50 apartment Cora's morning marketing had been an orderly
daily proceeding. Meat, vegetables, fruit, dry groceries. But now the
maidless four-room apartment took on, in spite of its cumbersome
furnishings, a certain air of impermanence.

"Ray, honey, I haven't a scrap in the house. I didn't get home until
almost six. Those darned old street cars. I hate 'em. Do you mind going
over Jo Bauer's to eat? I won't go, because Myrtle served a regular
spread at four. I couldn't eat a thing. D'you mind?"

"Why, no." He would get into his coat again and go out into the bleak
November wind-swept street to Bauer's restaurant.

Cora was always home when Raymond got there at six. She prided herself
on this. She would say, primly, to her friends, "I make a point of being
there when Ray gets home. Even if I have to cut a round of bridge. If a
woman can't be there when a man gets home from work I'd like to know
what she's good for, anyway."

The girls in the Crowd said she was spoiling Raymond. She told Ray this.
"They think I'm old-fashioned. Well, maybe I am. But I guess I never
pretended to be anything but a home girl."

"That's right," Ray would answer. "Say, that's the way you caught me.
With that home-girl stuff."

"Caught you!" Th