middle-aged woman, stating, in their dreary third-floor front, an undeniable fact—­he was tired of her!  Walking aimlessly about in the cold, he said to himself, dully, “Why was I such an idiot as to marry her?” He was old enough to curse himself for his folly, but he was young enough to suffer, agonies of mortification, and to pity himself, too; pity himself for the mere physical discomfort of his life:  the boarding-house table, with its uninteresting food; the worn shirt cuff which was scratching his wrist; and he pitied himself for his spiritual discomfort—­when Eleanor called him “darling” at the dinner table, or exhibited her jealousy before people!  “They’re sorry for me—­confound ’em!” he thought....  Yet how trivial the cuff was, or even—­yes, even the impertinence which was “sorry” for him!—­how unimportant, when compared to a ring of braided grass, and the smell of locust blossoms, and a lovely voice, rising and falling: 

“O Spring!”

“Oh, damn!” he said to himself, feeling the scrape of worn linen on the back of his hand.  Then he fell into certain moody imaginings with which that winter he frequently and harmlessly amused himself.  He used to call these flights of fancy “fool thoughts”; but they were at least an outlet to his smoldering irritation, “Suppose I should kick over the traces some day?” his thoughts would run; and again, “Suppose I should be in a theater fire, and ‘disappear,’ and never come back, and she’d think I was dead,” “Suppose there should be a war, and I should enlist,” ... and so forth, and so forth.  “Fool thoughts,” of course!—­but Maurice is not the only man upon whom a jealous woman has thrust such thoughts, or who has found solace in the impossible!  So, now, wandering about in the cold, he amused himself by imagining various ways of “kicking over the traces”; then, suddenly, it occurred to him that he wanted something to eat.  “By George!” he thought, “I’ll get that girl, Lily, and we’ll go and have a good dinner!”

Even in the rococo vestibule of the yellow-brick apartment house, while he pressed the bell below Miss Lily Dale’s letter box, he began to feel a glow of comfort; and when Lily let him into her little parlor, all clean and vulgar and warm, and fragrant with blossoming bulbs, and gave him a greeting that was almost childlike in its laughing pleasure, his sense of physical well-being was a sort of hitting back at Eleanor.

“Oh,” said little Lily, “my!  Ain’t you cold!  Why, your hand’s just like ice!”

He let her help him off with his coat, and push him into what had been the vanished Batty’s chair; then she saw that his feet were wet, and insisted (to his horror) on unlacing his boots and making him put on a pair of slippers.

“But I was going to take you out to dinner,” he remonstrated.

She said:  “Oh no!  It’s cold.  I’ll cook something for you, and we’ll have our dinner right by that fire.”

“Can you cook?” he said, with admiring astonishment.