Of late years, or, more specifically, for two years and eight months, another picture had invaded, even superseded the old.  A stamp-photograph likeness of Mr. James P. Batch in the corner of Miss Slayback’s mirror, and thereafter No Man’s slippers became number eight-and-a-half C, and the hearth a gilded radiator in a dining-living-room somewhere between the Fourteenth Street Subway and the land of the Bronx.

How Miss Slayback, by habit not gregarious, met Mr. Batch is of no consequence, except to those snug ones of us to whom an introduction is the only means to such an end.

At a six o’clock that invaded even Union Square with heliotrope dusk, Mr. James Batch mistook, who shall say otherwise, Miss Gertie Slayback, as she stepped down into the wintry shade of a Subway kiosk, for Miss Whodoesitmatter.  At seven o’clock, over a dish of lamb stew a la White Kitchen, he confessed, and if Miss Slayback affected too great surprise and too little indignation, try to conceive six nine-hour week-in-and-week-out days of hair-pins and darning-balls, and then, at a heliotrope dusk, James P. Batch, in invitational mood, stepping in between it and the papered walls of a dun-colored evening.  To further enlist your tolerance, Gertie Slayback’s eyes were as blue as the noon of June, and James P. Batch, in a belted-in coat and five kid finger-points protruding ever so slightly and rightly from a breast pocket, was hewn and honed in the image of youth.  His the smile of one for whom life’s cup holds a heady wine, a wrinkle or two at the eye only serving to enhance that smile; a one-inch feather stuck upright in his derby hatband.

It was a forelock once stamped a Corsican with the look of emperor.  It was this hat feather, a cock’s feather at that and worn without sense of humor, to which Miss Slayback was fond of attributing the consequences of that heliotrope dusk.

“It was the feather in your cap did it, Jimmie.  I can see you yet, stepping up with that innocent grin of yours.  You think I didn’t know you were flirting?  Cousin from Long Island City!  ‘Say,’ I says to myself, I says, ’I look as much like his cousin from Long Island City, if he’s got one, as my cousin from Hoboken (and I haven’t got any) would look like my sister if I had one.’  It was that sassy little feather in your hat!”

They would laugh over this ever-green reminiscence on Sunday Park benches and at intermission at moving pictures when they remained through it to see the show twice.  Be the landlady’s front parlor ever so permanently rented out, the motion-picture theater has brought to thousands of young city starvelings, if not the quietude of the home, then at least the warmth and a juxtaposition and a deep darkness that can lave the sub-basement throb of temples and is filled with music with a hum in it.