“Of me?”

“Nicky so—­so strong.”

“My poor pussy!  I didn’t mean—­”

“Nicky-boy, go home like good Nicky.”

“I don’t want ever to go home.”

“Go now, Josie says.”

“You mean never.”

“Now!”

He kissed his “No, No,” down against each of her eyelids.

“You must,” she said this time, and pushed him off.

For a second he sat quite still, the black shine in his eyes seeming to give off diamond points.

“You’re nervous,” he said, and jerked her back so that the breath jumped again.

The tail of her glance curved to the gilt clock half hidden behind a litter of used highball glasses, and then, seeing that his quickly suspicious eye followed hers: 

“No,” she said, “not nervous.  Just tired—­and thirsty.”

He poured her a high drink from a decanter, and held it so that, while she sipped, her teeth were magnified through the tumbler, and he thought that adorable and tilted the glass higher against her lips, and when she choked soothed her with a crush of kisses.

“You devil,” he said, “everything you do maddens me.”

There was a step outside and a scraping noise at the lock.  It was only a vaudeville youth, slender as a girl, who lived on the floor above, feeling unsteadily, and a bit the worse for wear, for the lock that must eventually fit his key.

But on that scratch into the keyhole, Josie leaped up in terror, so that Nicholas went staggering back against the Bacchante, shattering to a fine ring of crystal some of the pink grapes, and on that instant she clicked out the remaining lights, shoving him, with an unsuspected and catamount strength, into an adjoining box of a kitchenette.

There an uncovered bulb burned greasily over a small refrigerator, that stood on a table and left only the merest slit of walking space.  It was the none too fastidious kitchen of a none too fastidious woman.  A pair of dress shields hung on the improvised clothesline of a bit of twine.  A clump of sardines, one end still shaped to the tin, cloyed in its own oil, crumbily, as if bread had been sopped in, the emptied tin itself, with the top rolled back with a patent key, filled now with old beer.  Obviously the remaining contents of a tumbler had been flung in.  Cigarette stubs floated.  A pasteboard cylindrical box, labeled “Sodium Bi-carbonate,” had a spoon stuck in it.  A rubber glove drooped deadly over the sink edge.

On the second that he stood in that smelling fog, probably for no longer than it took the swinging door to settle, something of sickness rushed over Nicholas.  The unaired odors of old foods.  Those horrific things on the line.  The oil that had so obviously been sopped up with bread.  The old beer, edged in grease.  Something of sickness and a panoramic flash of things absurdly, almost unreasonably irrelevant.