rein of scorched pride and the corner of
her tear-dimmed glance for the remote table with the centerpiece of
pink carnations.

By what seemed demoniac aforethought the Binswanger three-room suite was
rigidly impervious to sunlight, air, and daylight. Its infinitesimal
sitting-room, which the jerking backward of a couch-cover transformed
into Mr. Isadore Binswanger's bedchamber, afforded a one-window view of
a long, narrow shaft which rose ten stories from a square of asphalt
courtyard, up from which the heterogeneous fumes of cookery wafted like
smoke through a legitimate flue.

Mr. Binswanger dropped into a veteran arm-chair that had long since
finished duty in the deluxe suite, and breathed onward through a beard
as close-napped as Spanish moss.

He was suddenly old and as withered as an aspen leaf trembling on its
rotten stem. Vermiculate cords of veins ran through the flesh like the
chirography of pain written in the blue of an indelible pencil; yellow
crow's-feet, which rayed outward from his eyes, were deep as claw-prints
in damp clay.

"Becky, help me off with my shoes; heavy like lead they feel."

"Poil, unlace your papa's shoes. Since I got to dress for dinner I can't
stoop no more."

Miss Binswanger tugged daintily at her father's boots, staggering
backward at each pull.

"_Ach_, go way, Pearlie! Better than that I can do myself."

"See, mamma; nothing suits him."

Mrs. Binswanger regarded her husband's batrachian sallowness with
anxious eyes; her large bosom heaved under its showy lace yoke, and her
short, dimpled hands twirled at their rings.

"To-night, Julius, if you don't do like the doctor says I telephone him
to come. That a man should be such a coward! It don't do you no good to
take only one sleeping-tablet; two, he said, is what you need."

"Too much sleeping-powder is what killed old man Knauss."

"_Ach_, Julius, you heard yourself what Dr. Ellenburg said. Six of the
little pink tablets he said it would take to kill a man. How can two of
'em hurt you? Already by the bed I got the box of 'em waiting, Julius,
with an orange so they don't even taste."

"It ain't doctors and their _gedinks_, Becky, can do me good. Pink
tablets can't make me sleep. I--_ach_, Becky, I'm tired--tired."

Isadore rose from the couch-bed and punched his head-print out of the
cushion.

"Lay here, pa."

"Na, na, I go me to bed. Such a thing full of lumps don't rest me like a
sofa at home. Na, I go me to bed