few whirls of the knives and out it comes minced fine enough for sausage."
"No, Billy. Don't make me look at it! I can't!"
"Why, Minnie!"
"I can't bear it! It makes a squishy sound. It makes me sick to my stummick."
Billy was disappointed. She would never make an A-Number One butcher's wife. Before Mrs. Hesselman died he remembered how much pleasure she took in working with her husband, how cleverly she had learned to use the big knives and cleavers. She could go to the wholesalers and pick out better cuts than old Hesselman himself. Billy gave up all hopes that Minnie would be what his father had always called his hard-working mother, "a good wife." But she was a dear little wife, pretty, full of fun, and he was proud of her.
Minnie turned for companionship to the cheap novels which were lying on a dusty shelf. But the fine print hurt her eyes, and she preferred to sit there with her hands hanging listlessly over the rungs of an old armchair and stare into space, reviewing as in a daze her experiences at the studios. How drab and colorless the every-day reality seemed by comparison to the glitter of the "movies." This very room she was in, a bedroom; a great oak-stained, sway-backed bed covered with coarse sheets, cheap blankets, and a crazy quilt; oak furniture, crumbling mantelpiece . . . gas jets! How different it was from the bedroom built on the stage at the studio; the one they called the boudoir. Minnie had slipped in unaware one afternoon and slid her hand over the pink satin coverlet. A gilded bed with a
