“Momie, I’ll stir for a while.”

Marcia’s voice was day-schooled.  As clipped, as boxed, and as precise as a hedge.  Neat, too, as neat as the way her clear lips met, and her teeth, which had a little mannerism of coming down after each word, biting them off like threads.  They were appealing teeth that had never grown big or square.  Very young corn.  To Hattie there was something about them that reminded her of a tiny set of Marcia’s doll dishes that she had saved.  Little innocences.

“I don’t mind stirring, dear.  I’m not tired.”

“But your face is all twisted.”

Hattie’s twisted face could induce in Marcia the same gagged pallor that the egg in the morning or the red in the beefsteak juices brought there.

“Go in and play the piano awhile, Marcy, I’ll be finished soon.”

“Sh-h-h!  No.  Pussy-kitty’s asleep.”

As the cream grew heavier and its swirl in the pot slower, Hattie could keep the twist out of her face only by biting her tongue.  She did, and a little arch of sweat came out in a mustache.

The brown mud of the cream began to fluff.  Hattie rubbed a fleck of it into her freckled forearm.  Yes, Hattie’s arm was freckled, and so was the bridge of her nose, in a little saddle.  Once there had been a prettiness to the freckles because they whitened the skin they sprinkled and were little stars to the moon reddiness of Hattie’s hair.  But the red of the moon had set coldly in Hattie’s hair now, and the stars were just freckles, and there was the dreaded ridge of flesh showing above the ridge of her corsets, and when she leaned forward to stir her cheeks hung forward like a spaniel’s, not of fat, but heaviness.  Hattie’s arms and thighs were granite to the touch and to the scales.  Kindly freckled granite.  She weighed almost twice what she looked.  Marcia, whose hips were like lyres, hated the ridge above the corset line and massaged it.  Mab smacking the Himalayas.

After a while, there in the window frame, Marcia closed her eyes.  There was still the illusion of a purr about her.  Probably because, as her kitten warmed in its circle, its coziness began to whir mountingly.  The September afternoon was full of drone.  The roofs of the city from Hattie’s kitchen window, which overlooked Morningside Heights, lay flat as slaps.  Tranced, indoor quiet.  Presently Hattie began to tiptoe.  The seventy-two jars were untopped now, in a row on a board over the built-in washtub.  Seventy-two yawning for content.  Squnch!  Her enormous spoon into the copper kettle and flop, gurgle, gooze, softly into the jars.  One—­two—­three—­At the sixty-eighth, Marcia, without stirring or lifting her lids, spoke into the sucky silence.

“Momie?”

“Yes, Marcy.”

“You’ll be glad.”

Hattie, pausing at the sixty-eighth, “Why, dear?”

“I came home in Nonie Grosbeck’s automobile.  I’m invited to a dinner dance October the seventeenth.  At their house in Gramercy Park.”