that same week that Raymond met the woman in 620. He had left the
apartment half an hour later than usual (he had a heavy cold, and had
not slept) and encountered the man and woman just coming out of 620.

"And guess who it was!" he exclaimed to Cora that evening. "It was a
girl who used to work at Nagel's, in the binoculars, years ago, when I
started there. Calhoun, her name was. Laura Calhoun. Smart little girl,
she was. She's married now. And guess what! She gets a big salary
fitting glasses for women at the Bazaar. She learned to be an optician.
Smart girl."

Cora bridled, virtuously. "Well, I think she'd better stay home and take
care of that child of hers. I should think she'd let her husband earn
the living. That child is all soul alone when she comes home from
school. I hear her practising. I asked Mrs. Hoyt about her. She say's
she's seen her. A pindling scrawny little thing, about ten years old.
She leaves her alone all day."

Ray encountered the Calhoun girl again, shortly after that, in the way
encounters repeat themselves, once they have started.

"She didn't say much but I guess her husband is a nit-wit. Funny how a
smart girl like that always marries one of these sap-heads that can't
earn a living. She said she was working because she wanted her child to
have the advantages she'd missed. That's the way she put it."

One heard the long-legged, melancholy child next door practising at the
piano daily at four. Cora said it drove her crazy. But then, Cora was
rarely home at four. "Well," she said now, virtuously, "I don't know
what she calls advantages. The way she neglects that kid. Look at her! I
guess if she had a little more mother and a little less education it'd
be better for her."

"Guess that's right," Ray agreed.

It was in September that Cora began to talk about the mink coat. A
combination anniversary and Christmas gift. December would mark their
twelfth anniversary. A mink coat.

Raymond remembered that his mother had had a mink coat, back there in
Michigan, years ago. She always had taken it out in November and put it
away in moth balls and tar paper in March. She had done this for years
and years. It was a cheerful yellow mink, with a slightly darker marking
running through it, and there had been little mink tails all around the
bottom edge of it. It had spread comfortably at the waist. Women had had
hips in those days. With it his mother had carried a mink muff; a small
yellow-brown cy