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blanket and the pillows.

Picking up the soiled shirt and the towel from the floor and pausing, laying the shirt on the couch but still carrying the towel, she went to the table and looked at the jug now with that bemused inscrutable expression.

She wiped one of the stick glasses with finicking care and poured into it from the jug almost what a thimble would have held and drank it, the smallest finger of that hand crooked delicately, in a series of birdlike and apparently extremely distasteful sips.

Then she gathered up what she could conveniently carry of the nights misplaced litter and returned beyond the curtain, though when she went to where she had set the basket on the floor against the wall with the hat and coat lying upon it, you could not hear her cross the floor at all nor stoop and take from the basket an empty pint bottle sparklingly clean as a sterilized milk bottle.

Ordinarily she would not have filled the flask at any single establishment of her morning round, on the contrary filling the bottle little by little with a sort of niggard and foresighted husbandry and arriving at home in mid-afternoon with a pint of liquid weird, potent, anonymous, and strange; but once more she seemed to find the situation its own warrant, returning and putting the filled flask back into the basket still without any sound.

The reporter heard only the broom for a time, and other muted sounds as though the room were putting itself to rights by means of some ghostly and invisible power of its own, until she came at last to the alcove’s doorway, where he stood tying his tie, with the hat and coat on again and the basket beneath its neat napkin again on her arm.

“I’m through,” she said. “The coffee’s ready, but you better not waste no time over drinking hit.”
“All right,” he said. “I’ll have to make another loan from you.”
“You won’t need but a dime to get to the paper. Ain’t you got even that much left?”

“I ain’t going to the paper. I’m fired, I tell you. I want two dollars.”
“I has to work for my money. Last time I lent you hit took you three weeks to start paying me back.”

“I know. But I have to have it. Come on, Leonora. I’ll pay you back Saturday.” She reached inside her coat; one of the bills was his own.

“The key’s on the table,” she said. “I washed hit off too.” It lay there, on the table clean and empty save for the key; he took it up and mused upon it with that face which the few hours of violent excess had altered from that of one brightly and peacefully dead to that of one coming back from, or looking out of, hell itself.

“But it’s all right,” he said. “It don’t matter. It ain’t anything.” He stood in the clean empty room where there was not even a cigarette-stub or a burned match to show any trace. “Yair. She didn’t even leave a hair-pin,” he thought. “Or maybe she don’t use them.

Or maybe I was drunk and they were not even here”; looking down at the key with a grimace faint and tragic which might have been called smiling while he talked to himself, giving himself the advice which he knew he was not going to take when he insisted on borrowing the two dollars.

“Because I had thirty before I spent the eleven-eighty and then the five for the absinth. That left about thirteen.” Then he cried, not loud, not moving: “Besides, maybe she will tell me.

Maybe she intended to all the time but they couldn’t wait for me to come to,” without even bothering to tell himself that he knew he was lying, just saying quietly and stubbornly, “All right. But I’m going anyway. Even if I don’t do anything but walk up where she can see me and stand there for a minute.”

He held the key in his hand now while the door clicked behind him, standing for a moment longer with his eyes shut against the impact of light, of the thin sun, and then opening them, steadying himself against the door frame where he had slept, remembering the coffee which the negress had made and he had forgot about until now, while the alley swam away into mirage shapes, tilting like the sea or say the lake surface, against which the ordeal of destination, of hope and dread, shaped among the outraged nerves of vision the bright vague pavilion glitter beneath the whipping purple-and-gold pennons. “It’s all right,” he said. “It ain’t nothing but money. It don’t matter.”

It was not two when he reached the airport, but already the parking lots along the boulevard were filling, with the young men paid doubtless out of some wearily initialled national fund, in the purple-and-gold caps lent or perhaps compulsory, clinging to running-boards, moving head-and-shoulders above the continuous top-line of already parked cars as though they consisted of torsos alone and ran on wires for no purpose and towards no discernible destination.

A steady stream of people flowed along the concrete gutters, converging towards the entrances, but the reporter did not follow. To the left was the hangar where they would be now but he did not go there either; he just stood in the bright hazy-damp-filled sunlight, with the pennons whipping stiffly overhead and the wind which blew them seeming to blow through him too, not cold, not unpleasant: just whipping his clothing about him as if it blew unimpeded save by the garment, through his rib-cage and among his bones. “I ought to eat,’” he thought.

“I ought to,” not moving yet as though he hung static in a promise made to someone which he did not believe even yet that he was going to break. The restaurant was not far; already it seemed to him that he could hear the clash and clatter and the voices and smell the food, thinking of the three of them yesterday while the little boy burrowed with flagging determination into the second plate of ice-cream.

Then he could hear the sounds, the noise, and smell the food itself as he stood looking at the table where they had sat yesterday, where a family group from a grandmother to an infant in arms now sat. He went to the counter. “Breakfast,” he said.
“What do you want to eat?” the waitress said.

“What do people eat for breakfast?” he said, looking at her — a porcelain-faced woman whose hair, complexion and uniform appeared to have been made of various shades of that material which old-time book-keepers used to protect their sleeves with — and smiling: or he would have called it smiling. “That’s right. It ain’t breakfast now, is it?”

“What do you want to eat?”
“Roast beef,” his mind said at last. “Potatoes,” he said. “It don’t matter.”
“Sandwich or lunch?”

“Yes,” he said.
“Yes, what? You wanna order don’t you wanna?”
“Sandwich,” he said.
“Mash one!” the waitress cried.

“And that’s that,” he thought, as though he had discharged the promise; as though by ordering, acquiescing to the idea, he had eaten the food too. “And then I will…” Only the hangar was not the mirage but the restaurant, the counter, the clash and clatter, the sound of food and of eating.

It seemed to him that he could see the group: the aeroplane, the four dungaree figures, the little boy in dungarees too, himself approaching: I hope you found everything you wanted before you left? Yes, thank you. It was thirteen dollars. Just till Saturday — No matter; it don’t matter; don’t even think of it. Now suddenly he heard the amplifier too in the rotunda; it had been speaking for some time but he had just noticed it:
“… second day of the Feinman Airport dedication invitation meet held under the official rules of the American Aeronautical Association and through the courtesy of the city of New Valois and of Colonel H. I. Feinman, Chairman of the Sewage Board of New Valois.

Events for the afternoon as follows…”He quit listening to it then, drawing from his pocket the pamphlet programme of yesterday and opening it at the second fading imprint of the mimeograph:

FRIDAY
2.30 — p m. Spot Parachute Jump. Purse $25.00.
3.00 — p m. Scull Speed Dash. 375 cu in. Qualifying speed 180 in p h. Purse $325.00 (l, 2, 3, 4).
3.30 — p m. Aerial Acrobatics. Jules Despleins, France. Lieut.
Frank Burnham, United States.
4.30 — p m. Scull Speed Dash. 575 cu in. Qualifying speed, 200 in p h. Purse $650.00 (l, 2, 3, 4).
5.00 — p m. Delayed Parachute Drop.
8.00 — p m. Special Mardi Gras Evening Event. Rocket Plane.
Lieut. Frank Burnham.

He continued to look at the page long after the initial impact of optical surprise had faded. “That’s all,” he said. “That’s all she would have to do. Just tell me they… It ain’t the money. She knows it ain’t that. It ain’t the money with me any more than it is with them,” he said; the man had to speak to him twice before the reporter knew he was there. “Hello,” he said.

“So you got out here after all,” the other said. Behind the man stood another, a short man with morose face, carrying a newspaper camera.
“Yes,” the reporter said. “Hi, Jug,” he said to the second man. The first looked at him curiously.

“You look like you have been dragged through hell by the heels,” he said. “You going to cover this to-day too?”
“Not that I know of,” the reporter said. “I understand I am fired. Why?”

“I was about to ask you. Hagood phoned me at

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blanket and the pillows. Picking up the soiled shirt and the towel from the floor and pausing, laying the shirt on the couch but still carrying the towel, she went