“Don’t tremble so, darling.  Mamma knows.  He told Mrs. Gronauer last night when she was joking him to buy a ten-dollar carnation for the Convalescent Home Bazaar, that he would only take one if it was white, because little white flowers reminded him of Alma Samstag.”

“Oh, mamma!”

“Say, it is as plain as the nose on your face.  He can’t keep his eyes off you.  He sells goods to Doctor Gronauer’s clinic and he says the same thing about him.  It makes me so happy, Alma, to think you won’t have to hold him off any more.”

“I’ll never leave you.  Never!”

Nevertheless, she was the first to drop off to sleep, pink there in the dark with the secret of her blushes.

Then for Mrs. Samstag the travail set in.  Lying there with her raging head tossing this way and that on the heated pillow, she heard with cruel awareness the minutiae, all the faint but clarified noises that can make a night seem so long.  The distant click of the elevator depositing a nighthawk.  A plong of the bedspring.  Somebody’s cough.  A train’s shriek.  The jerk of plumbing.  A window being raised.  That creak which lies hidden in every darkness, like a mysterious knee joint.  By three o’clock she was a quivering victim to these petty concepts, and her pillow so explored that not a spot but was rumpled to the aching lay of he cheek.

Once Alma, as a rule supersensitive to her mother’s slightest unrest, floated up for the moment out of her young sleep, but she was very drowsy and very tired, and dream tides were almost carrying her back as she said: 

“Mamma, you all right?”

Simulating sleep, Mrs. Samstag lay tense until her daughter’s breathing resumed its light cadence.

Then at four o’clock the kind of nervousness that Mrs. Samstag had learned to fear began to roll over her in waves, locking her throat and curling her toes and fingers and her tongue up dry against the roof of her mouth.

She must concentrate now—­must steer her mind away from the craving!

Now then:  West End Avenue.  Louis liked the apartments there.  Luxurious.  Quiet.  Residential.  Circassian walnut or mahogany dining room?  Alma should decide.  A baby-grand piano.  Later to be Alma’s engagement gift from “mamma and—­papa.”  No, “mamma and Louis.”  Better so.

How her neck and her shoulder blade and now her elbow were flaming with the pain.  She cried a little, quite silently, and tried a poor, futile scheme for easing her head in the crotch of her elbow.

Now then:  She must knit Louis some neckties.  The silk-sweater stitch would do.  Married in a traveling suit.  One of those smart dark-blue twills like Mrs. Gronauer, junior’s.  Topcoat—­sable.  Louis’ hair thinning.  Tonic.  O God! let me sleep!  Please, God!  The wheeze rising in her closed throat.  That little threatening desire that must not shape itself!  It darted with the hither and thither of a bee bumbling against a garden wall.  No!  No!  Ugh! the vast chills of nervousness.  The flaming, the craving chills of desire!