Mrs. Peters reposed her 200 pounds on the safer of the two chairs and gazed stolidly out the one window at the brick wall opposite.  Her eyes were red and damp.  The furniture could have been carried away on a pushcart, but no pushcart man would have removed it as a gift.

The door opened to admit Mr. Peters.  His fox-terrier eyes expressed a wish.  His wife’s diagnosis located correctly the seat of it, but misread it hunger instead of thirst.

“You’ll get nothing more to eat till night,” she said, looking out of the window again.  “Take your hound-dog’s face out of the room.”

Mr. Peters’s eye calculated the distance between them.  By taking her by surprise it might be possible to spring upon her, overthrow her, and apply the throttling tactics of which he had boasted to his waiting comrades.  True, it had been only a boast; never yet had he dared to lay violent hands upon her; but with the thoughts of the delicious, cool bock or Culmbacher bracing his nerves, he was near to upsetting his own theories of the treatment due by a gentleman to a lady.  But, with his loafer’s love for the more artistic and less strenuous way, he chose diplomacy first, the high card in the game—­the assumed attitude of success already attained.

“You have a dollar,” he said, loftily, but significantly in the tone that goes with the lighting of a cigar—­when the properties are at hand.

“I have,” said Mrs. Peters, producing the bill from her bosom and crackling it, teasingly.

“I am offered a position in a—­in a tea store,” said Mr. Peters.  “I am to begin work to-morrow.  But it will be necessary for me to buy a pair of—­”

“You are a liar,” said Mrs. Peters, reinterring the note.  “No tea store, nor no A B C store, nor no junk shop would have you.  I rubbed the skin off both me hands washin’ jumpers and overalls to make that dollar.  Do you think it come out of them suds to buy the kind you put into you?  Skiddoo!  Get your mind off of money.”

Evidently the poses of Talleyrand were not worth one hundred cents on that dollar.  But diplomacy is dexterous.  The artistic temperament of Mr. Peters lifted him by the straps of his congress gaiters and set him on new ground.  He called up a look of desperate melancholy to his eyes.

“Clara,” he said, hollowly, “to struggle further is useless.  You have always misunderstood me.  Heaven knows I have striven with all my might to keep my head above the waves of misfortune, but—­”

“Cut out the rainbow of hope and that stuff about walkin’ one by one through the narrow isles of Spain,” said Mrs. Peters, with a sigh.  “I’ve heard it so often.  There’s an ounce bottle of carbolic on the shelf behind the empty coffee can.  Drink hearty.”