always, near the side wall: her eyes lay burning
against the cold glare of the gas.

Above her shoulder on the wall was a large sheet of fashions: women with
wasp waists, smirking, rolling: stiff men, all clothes, with little
heads. Under the table--where Meyer sits with his big feet so much to
look at--Flora played, a soiled bundle, with a ball of yarn and a huge
gleaming scizzors.--No one perhaps comes, and then I do not mind sitting
and keeping the store. I saw a dead horse in the street.--A dead horse,
two days dead, rotting and stiff. Against the grey of the living street,
a livid dead horse: a hot stink was his cold death against the street's
clean-ness. There are two little boys, wrapped in blue coat, blue
muffler, leather caps. They stand above the gaunt head of the horse and
sneer at him. His flank rises red and huge. His legs are four strokes
away from life. He is dead. The naughty boys pick up bricks. They stand,
very close, above the head of the horse. They hurl down a brick. It
strikes the horse's skull, falls sharp away. They hurl down a brick. It
cuts the swollen nostril, falls soft away. The horse does not mind, the
horse does not hurt. He is dead.

--Go away, you two! Throwing stones at a dead horse! Go away, I say! How
would you like--When one is dead, stones strike one's skull and fall
sharp away, one is moveless. When one is dead, stones strike the soft of
one's throat and fall soft away, one is hurtless. When one is dead one
does not hurt.

She sat and turned her eyes away from her child. Flora had smear on her
face; her hands were grimed with the floor. One of her stockings was
down: her little white knee was going to scrape on the floor, be black
before it was bloody. So--A long shining table under a cold gas spurt. A
store with clothes and a stove: no place for herself. A row of suits,
all pressed and stiff with Meyer's diligence. A pile of suits, writhed
with the wear of men, soiled, crumpled with traffic of streets, with
bending of bodies in toil, in eating, in loving perhaps. Grimed living
suits. Meyer takes an iron and it steams and it presses hard, it sucks
up the grime. It sucks out the life from the suit. The suit is stiff and
dead, now, ready to go once more over the body of a man and suck to
itself his life.

The automatic bell clangs. There in the open door was a dark tall
woman--customer.

Esther stood, too. She felt she was shorter and less tidy: more
beautiful though.

Two w