“Aw, that’s an old jew’s-harp.  I’ll buy you one.  How’s that?”

“All right, I guess,” she said, starting off suddenly toward the bathhouse.

He was relieved that she had thrown off the silence.

“Ain’t mad any more, are you, Marylin?”

“No, Getaway—­not mad.”

“Mustn’t get fussy that way with me, Marylin.  It scares me off.  I’ve had something to show you all day, but you keep scaring me off.”

“What is it?” she said, tiptoe.

His mouth drew up to an oblique.  “You know.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Maybe I’ll tell you and maybe I won’t,” he cried, scooping up a handful of sand and spraying her.  “What’ll you give me if I tell?”

“Why—­nothing.”

“Want to know?”

But at the narrowing something in his eyes she sidestepped him, stooping down at the door of her bathhouse for a last scoop of sand at him.

“No,” she cried, her hair blown like spray and the same breeze carrying her laughter, guiltless of mood, out to sea.

On the way home, though, for the merest second, there recurred the puzzling quirk in her thoughtlessness.

In the crush of the electric train, packed tightly into the heart of the most yammering and petulant crowd in the world—­home-going pleasure seekers—­a youth rose to give her his seat.  A big, beach-tanned fellow with a cowlick of hair, when he tipped her his hat, standing up off his right brow like a little apostrophe to him, and blue eyes so very wide apart, and so clear, that they ran back into his head like aisles with little lakes shining at the ends of them.

“Thank you,” said Marylin, the infinitesimal second while his hat and cowlick lifted, her own gaze seeming to run down those avenues of his eyes for a look into the pools at the back.

“That was it, too, Getaway!  The thing that fellow looked—­that I couldn’t say.  He said it—­with his eyes.”

“Who?”

“That fellow who gave me this seat.”

“I’ll break his face if he goo-goos you,” said Getaway, who by this time had a headache and whose feet had fitted reluctantly back into patent leather.

But inexplicably, even to herself, that night, in the shadow of the stoop of her witch of a rooming house, she let him kiss her lips.  His first of her—­her first to any man.  It may have been that suddenly she was so extremely tired—­tired of the lay of the week ahead, suggested by the smells and the noises and the consciousness of that front box pleat.

The little surrender, even though she drew back immediately, was wine to him and as truly an intoxicant.

“Marylin,” he cried, wild for her lips again, “I can’t be held off much longer.  I’m straight with you, but I’m human, too.”

“Don’t, Getaway, not here!  To-morrow—­maybe.”

“I’m crazy for you!”

“Go home now, Getaway.”

“Yes—­but just one more—­”