toward the cold, cloyed
dinner, half-eaten and unappetizing on the table; and fell to scooping
some of the cold gravy up from its dish, letting it dripple from the
spoon back again. The powder had long since washed off her cheeks and
her face was cold as dough. The tears had dried around her mouth.

Presently she pinned up the lacy train about her, opened a cupboard door
and slid into a dark, full-length coat, pinned on a hat with a feather
that dropped over one side as if limp with wet, dabbed at her face with
a pink powder-chamois and, wheezing ever so slightly, went out, tweaking
off two of the three electric lights after her--down two flights of
stairs through a quiet foyer and out into the fluid warmth of late
October. Stars were out, myriads of them.

An hour she walked--down the cross-town street and a bit along the
wide, bright, lighted driveway, its traffic long since died down to an
occasional night-prowling cab, a skimming motor-car; then down a flight
of curving stone steps with her slightly perceptible limp, and into the
ledge of parkway where shadows took her into their velvet silence; down
a second flight, across a railroad track, and to the water's edge, where
a great coal-station ran a jut of pier out into the river. She could
walk its length, feeling it sway to the heavy tug of current.

Out at the very edge the water washed up against the piles with a thick,
inarticulate lisp, as if what it had to say might only be understood
from the under side.

THE NAME AND THE GAME

At Christmas-tide men and women with soiled lives breathe alcoholic
sighs and dare to glance back into the dim corridors of their long agos.

Cronies, snug in an age of steam heat, turn their warm backs upon
to-day, swap white-Christmas stories, and hanker with forefinger laid
alongside of nose for the base-burners and cold backs of the good old
days.

Not least upon the busy magnate's table is his shopping-list.

Evenings, six-dollar-a-week salesgirls sit in their five-dollar-a-week
hall-bedrooms, with their aching feet in a tub of hot water and their
aching fingers busy with baby-ribboned coat-hangers and silk needle-book
tokens of Yuletide affection.

Even as it flowered in a manger the Christmas spirit, a perennial lily
upon the sooty face of the world, blooms out of the slack heap of men's
rife and strife.

In the hearts of children it is a pod filled with their first happiness.

Down from a sky the color of