-and-a-half C, and
the hearth a gilded radiator in a dining-living-room somewhere between
the Fourteenth Street Subway and the land of the Bronx.

How Miss Slayback, by habit not gregarious, met Mr. Batch is of no
consequence, except to those snug ones of us to whom an introduction is
the only means to such an end.

At a six o'clock that invaded even Union Square with heliotrope dusk,
Mr. James Batch mistook, who shall say otherwise, Miss Gertie Slayback,
as she stepped down into the wintry shade of a Subway kiosk, for Miss
Whodoesitmatter. At seven o'clock, over a dish of lamb stew _a la_ White
Kitchen, he confessed, and if Miss Slayback affected too great surprise
and too little indignation, try to conceive six nine-hour week-in-and
week-out days of hairpins and darning-balls, and then, at a heliotrope
dusk, James P. Batch, in invitational mood, stepping in between it and
the papered walls of a dun-colored evening. To further enlist your
tolerance, Gertie Slayback's eyes were as blue as the noon of June, and
James P. Batch, in a belted-in coat and five kid finger-points
protruding ever so slightly and rightly from a breast pocket, was hewn
and honed in the image of youth. His the smile of one for whom life's
cup holds a heady wine, a wrinkle or two at the eye only serving to
enhance that smile; a one-inch feather stuck upright in his derby
hatband.

It was a forelock once stamped a Corsican with the look of emperor. It
was this hat feather, a cock's feather at that and worn without sense of
humor, to which Miss Slayback was fond of attributing the consequences
of that heliotrope dusk.

"It was the feather in your cap did it, Jimmie. I can see you yet,
stepping up with that innocent grin of yours. You think I didn't know
you were flirting? Cousin from Long Island City! 'Say,' I says to
myself, I says, 'I look as much like his cousin from Long Island City,
if he's got one, as my cousin from Hoboken (and I haven't got any) would
look like my sister if I had one.' It was that sassy little feather in
your hat!"

They would laugh over this ever-green reminiscence on Sunday park
benches and at intermission at moving pictures when they remained
through it to see the show twice. Be the landlady's front parlor ever so
permanently rented out, the motion-picture theater has brought to
thousands of young city starvelings, if not the quietude of the home,
then at least the warmth and a juxtaposition and a deep darkness that