“Six o’clock.  Six o’clock.”

He rushed out into the hallway and across to the parlor pinkly lit with velours, even through the rainy day, and so inflexibly calm.  Sara might have measured the distance between the chairs, so regimental they stood.  The pink-velour curlicue divan with the two pink, gold-tasseled cushions, carelessly exact.  The onyx-topped table with the pink-velour drape, also gold-tasseled.  The pair of equidistant and immaculate china cuspidors, rose-wreathed.  The smell of Sunday.

“Nicky, that you?”

It was his mother, from the dining room.

“Yes, mother,” and sauntered in.

There were two women sitting at the round table, shelling nuts.  One of them his mother, the other Miss Ada Berkowitz, who jumped up, spilling hulls.

Nicholas, in the velveteen dressing gown with the collar turned up, started to back out, Mrs. Turkletaub spoiling that.

“You can come in, Nicky.  Ada’ll excuse you.  I guess she’s seen a man in his dressing gown before; the magazine advertisements are full with them in worse and in less.  And on Sunday with a headache from all week working so hard, a girl can forgive.  He shouldn’t think with his head so much, I always tell him, Ada.”

“I didn’t know he was here,” said Miss Berkowitz, already thinking in terms of what she might have worn.

“I telephoned over for Ada, Nicky.  They got an automobile and she don’t need to get her feet wet to come over to a lonesome old woman on a rainy Sunday, to spend the day and learn me how to make those delicious stuffed dates like she fixed for her mother’s card party last week.  Draw up a chair, Nicky, and help.”

She was casual, she was matter-of-fact, she was bent on the business of nut cracking.  They crashed softly, never so much as bruised by her carefully even pressure.

“Thanks,” said Nicholas, and sat down, not caring to, but with good enough grace.  He wanted his coat, somehow, and fell to strumming the table top.

“Don’t, Nicky; you make me nervous.”

“Here,” said Miss Berkowitz, and gave him a cracker and a handful of nuts.  The little crashings resumed.

Ada had very fair skin against dark hair, slightly too inclined to curl.  There was quite a creamy depth to her—­a wee pinch could raise a bruise.  The kind of whiteness hers that challenged the string of tiny Oriental pearls she wore at her throat.  Her healthily pink cheeks and her little round bosom were plump, and across the back of each of her hands were four dimples that flashed in and out as she bore down on the cracker.  She was as clear as a mountain stream.

“A trifle too plumpy,” he thought, but just the same wished he had wet his military brushes.

“Ada has just been telling me, Nicky, about her ambition to be an interior decorator for the insides of houses.  I think it is grand the way some girls that are used to the best of everything prepare themselves for, God forbid, they should ever have to make their own livings.  I give them credit for it.  Tell Nicky, Ada, about the drawing you did last week that your teacher showed to the class.”