"If you want me to lay down on you, Kess, for sure, just ask me to show the line again before lunch. I'm about ready to keel. And you can't put me off again. I'm ready, and you got to come now."

He dug so deeply into his pockets that his sleeves crawled up.

"Say, look here. I've got my business to attend to, and, when my trade's in town, my trade comes first. See? Take off and show Keokuk a few numbers. I want him to see that chinchilla drape."

She reached out, closing her hand over his arm.

"I'll show him the whole line, Kess, when we're back from lunch. I got to talk to you, I tell you. You put me off yesterday and the day before, and this--this is the last."

"The last what?"

"Please, Kess, if you only run over to Rinehardt's with me. I got to tell you something. Something about me and--and--"

He regarded her in some perplexity. "Tell it to me here. Now!"

"I can't. The girls'll be swarming in any minute. I can't get you anywheres but lunch. It's the first thirty minutes of your time I've asked in five years, Kess--is that little enough? Let Cissie show Keokuk the blouses till we get back. It's something, Kess, I can't put off. Kess, please!"

Her face was so close to him and so eager that he turned to back out.

"Wait for me at the Thirty-first Street entrance," he said, "and I'll shoot you across to Rinehardt's."

She caught up her small silk hand-bag and ran out toward the elevators.

Down in Thirty-first Street a wave of heat met, almost overpowering her.

New York, enervated from sleepless nights on fire-escapes and in bedrooms opening on areaways, moved through it at half-speed, hugging the narrow shade of buildings. Infant mortality climbed with the thermometer. In Fifth Avenue, cool, high bedrooms were boarded and empty. In First Avenue, babies lay naked on the floor, snuffing out for want of oxygen.

Across that man-made Grand Canon men leap sometimes, but seldom. Mothers whose babies lie naked on the floor look out across it, damning.

Out into this flaying heat Miss Becker stepped gingerly, almost immediately rejoined by Mr. Leon Kessler, crowningly touched with the correct thing in straw sailors.

"Get a move on," he said, guiding her across the soft asphalt.

In Rinehardt's, one of a thousand such _Rathskeller_ retreats designed for a city that loves to dine in fifteen languages, the noonday cortege of summer widowers had not yet arrived. Waiters moved through the dim, pink-lit gloom, dressing their tables temptingly cool and white, dipping ice out from silver buckets into thin tumblers.

They seated themselves beneath a ceiling fan, Miss Becker's taffy-colored scallops stirring in the scurry of air.

"Lordy!" she said, closing her eyes and pressing her finger-tips against them, "I wish I could lease this spot for the summer!"

He pushed a menu-card toward her. "What'll you have? There's plenty under the 'ready to serve.'"

She peeled out of her white-silk gloves.

"Some cold cuts and a long ice-tea."

He ordered after her and more at length, then lighted a cigarette.

"Well?" he said, waving out a match.

She leaned forward, already designing with her fork on the table-cloth.

"Kess, can you guess?"

"Come on with it!"

"Have you--noticed anything?"

"Say, I'd have a sweet time keeping up with you girls!"

She looked at him now evenly between the eyes.

"You kept up with me pretty close for three years, didn't you?"

"Say, you knew what you were doing!"

"I--I'm not so sure of that by a long shot. I--I was fed up with the most devilish kind of promises there are. The kind you was too smart to put in words or--or in writing. You--you only looked 'em."

"I suppose you was kidnapped one dark and stormy night while the villain pursued you, eh? Is that it?"

"Oh, what's the use--rehashing! After that time at Atlantic City and--and then the--flat, it--it just seemed the way I felt about you then--that nothing you wanted could be wrong. I guess I knew what I was doing all right, or, if I didn't, I ought to have. I was rotten--or I couldn't have done it, I guess. Only, deep inside of me I was waiting and banking on you like--like poor little Cissie is now. And you knew it; you knew it all them three years."

"Say, did you get me over here to--"

"I only hope to God when you're done with Cissie you'll--"

"You let me take care of my own affairs. If it comes right down to it, there's a few things I could tell you, girl, that ain't so easy to listen to. Let's get off the subject while the going's good."

"Oh, anybody that plays as safe as you--"

He raised his voice, shoving back his chair. "Well, if you want me to clear out of this place quicker than you can bat your eye, you just--"

"No, no, Kess! 'Sh-h-h-h!"

"If there ever was a girl in my place had a square deal, that girl's been you."

"'Square deal!' Because after I held on and--ate out my heart for three years, you didn't--take away my job, too? Somebody ought to pin a Carnegie medal on you!"

"You've held down a twenty-dollar-a-week job season in and season out, when there've been times it didn't even pay for the ink it took to write you on the pay-roll."

"There's nothing I ever got out of you I didn't earn three times over."

"A younger figure than yours is getting to be wouldn't hurt the line any, you know. It's because I make it a rule not to throw off the old girls when their waist-lines begin to spread that makes you so grateful, is it? There's not a firm in town keeps on a girl after she begins to heavy up. If you got to know why I took you off the dress line and put you in the wraps, it's because I seen you widening into a thirty-eight, and a darn poor one at that. I can sell two wraps off Cissie to one off you. You're getting hippy, girl, and, since you started the subject, you can be darn glad you know where your next week's salary's coming from."

She was reddening so furiously that even her earlobes, their tips escaping beneath the turban, were tinged.

"Maybe I--I'm getting hippy, Kess; but it'll take more than anything you can ever do for me to make up for--"

"Gad!" he said, flipping an ash in some disgust, "I wish I had a ten-cent piece for every one since!"

"Oh," she cried, her throat jerking, "you eat what you just said! You eat it, because you know it ain't so!"