The young wife gets home, obsessed by the fact that she has struck a man in the face in a public vehicle.  She is still blushing when she relates the affair in a rush of talk to another young wife in the flat next to hers.  “For Heaven’s sake don’t tell my husband,” she implores.  “If he knew he’d leave me forever!” And the young husband comes home, after his own personal dose of street-car, preoccupied, fatigued, nervous, hungry, demanding to be loved.  And the young wife has to behave as though she had been lounging all the afternoon in a tea-gown on a soft sofa.  Curious that, although she is afraid of her husband’s wrath, the temptation to tell him grows stronger!  Indeed, is it not a rather fine thing that she has done, and was not the salute of the admiring male flattering and sweet?  Not many tiny wives would have had the pluck to slap a brute’s face.  She tells the young husband.  It is an error of tact on her part.  For he, secretly exacerbated, was waiting for just such an excuse to let himself go.  He is angry, he is outraged—­as she had said he would be.  What—­his wife, his-etc., etc.!

A night full of everything except sleep; full of Elevated and rumbling cars, and trumps of autos, and the eternal liveliness of the cobbled street, and all incomprehensible noises, and stuffiness, and the sense of other human beings too close above, too close below, and to the left and to the right, and before and behind, the sense that there are too many people on earth!  What New-Yorker does not know the wakings after the febrile doze that ends such a night?  The nerves like taut strings; love turned into homicidal hatred; and the radiator damnably tapping, tapping!...  The young husband afoot and shaved and inexpensively elegant, and he is demanding his fried eggs.  The young wife is afoot, too, manoeuvering against the conspiracies of the janitor, who lives far below out of sight, but who permeates her small flat like a malignant influence....  Hear the whistling of the dumb-waiter!...  Eggs are demanded, authoritatively, bitterly.  If glances could kill, not only that flat but the whole house would be strewn with corpses....  Eggs!...

Something happens, something arrives, something snaps; a spell is broken and horror is let loose.  “Take your eggs!” cries the tiny wife, in a passion.  The eggs fly across the table, and the front of a man’s suit is ruined.  She sits down and fairly weeps, appalled at herself.  Last evening she was punishing males; this morning she turns eggs into missiles, she a loving, an ambitious, an intensely respectable young wife!  As for him, he sits motionless, silent, decorated with the colors of eggs, a graduate of a famous university.  Calamity has brought him also to his senses.  Still weeping, she puts on her hat and jacket.  “Where are you going?” he asks, solemnly, no longer homicidal, no longer hungry.  “I must hurry to the cleaners for your other suit!” says she, tragic.  And she hurries....