he white
light of inspiration.

"I have it! Why not Ann Elizabeth?"

"Great!" And whistled so through his shaving that his mouth was rayed
with a dark sunburst of beard where the razor had not found surface.

They talked of housekeeping, reluctantly, it is true, because Mrs. Plush
herself was fitting up, of hard-to-spare evenings, a basinette of pink
and white. They even talked of schools.

Then came the inevitable time when Mrs. Jett lost interest. Quite out of
a clear sky even the Blue Points were taboo, and instead of joining this
or that card or sewing circle, there were long afternoons of stitching
away alone, sometimes the smile out on her face, sometimes not.

"Em, is it all right with you?" Henry asked her once or twice,
anxiously.

"Of course it is! If I weren't this way--now--it wouldn't be natural.
You don't understand."

He didn't, so could only be vaguely and futilely sorry.

Then one day something quite horrible, in a small way, happened to Mrs.
Jett. Sitting sewing, suddenly it seemed to her that through the very
fluid of her eyeballs, as it were, floated a school of fish. Small
ones--young smelts, perhaps--with oval lips, fillips to their tails, and
sides that glisted.

She laid down her bit of linen lawn, fingers to her lids as if to
squeeze out their tiredness. She was trembling from the unpleasantness,
and for a frightened moment could not swallow. Then she rose, shook out
her skirts, and to be rid of the moment carried her sewing up to
Mrs. Dang's, where a euchre game was in session, and by a few adroit
questions in between deals gained the reassurance that a nervous state
in her "condition" was highly normal.

She felt easier, but there was the same horrid recurrence three times
that week. Once during an evening of lotto down in the front parlor she
pushed back from the table suddenly, hand flashing up to her throat.

"Em!" said Mr. Jett, who was calling the numbers.

"It's nothing," she faltered, and then, regaining herself more fully,
"nothing," she repeated, the roundness out in her voice this time.

The women exchanged knowing glances.

"She's all right," said Mrs. Peopping, omnipotently. "Those things
pass."

Going upstairs that evening, alone in the hallway, they flung an arm
each across the other's shoulder, crowding playfully up the narrow
flight.

"Emmy," he said, "poor Em, everything will be all right."

She restrained an impulse to cry. "Poor nothing," she said.

B