. . . I'm a terrible sort of person. It's no use talking about it."
"I knew it. You knew I knew it. O God things are pretty rotten for me Ellie."
She sat with her knees hunched up and her hands clasped round them looking at him with wide eyes. "Are you really so crazy about me Jimps?"
"Look here lets get a divorce and be done with it."
"Dont be in such a hurry, Jimps. . . . And there's Martin. What about him?"
"I can scrape up enough money for him occasionally, poor little kid."
"I make more than you do, Jimps. . . . You shouldnt do that yet."
"I know. I know. Dont I know it?"
They sat looking at each other without speaking. Their eyes burned from looking at each other. Suddenly Jimmy wanted terribly to be asleep, not to remember anything, to let his head sink into blackness, as into his mother's lap when he was a kid.
"Well I'm going home." He gave a little dry laugh. "We didn't think it'd all go pop like this, did we?"
"Goodnight Jimps," she whined in the middle of a yawn.
"But things dont end. . . . If only I weren' so terribly sleepy. . . . Will you put out the light?"
He groped his way in the dark to the door. Outside the arctic morning was growing gray with dawn. He hurried back to his room. He wanted to get into bed and be asleep before it was light.
A long low room with long tables down the middle piled with silk and crêpe fabrics, brown, salmonpink, emeraldgreen. A smell of snipped thread and dress materials. All down the tables bowed heads auburn, blond, black, brown of girls sewing. Errandboys pushing rolling stands of hung
