How constant a stream is the runnel of men's small affairs!

Dynasties may totter and half the world bleed to death, but one or the
other corner _pâtisserie_ goes on forever.

At a moment when the shadow of world-war was over the country like a pair
of black wings lowering Mrs. Harry Ross, who swooned at the sight of blood
from a penknife scratch down the hand of her son, but yawned over the
head-line statistics of the casualties at Verdun, lifted a lid from a pot
that exuded immediate savory fumes, prodded with a fork at its content, her
concern boiled down to deal solely with stew.

An alarm-clock on a small shelf edged in scalloped white oilcloth ticked
with spick-and-span precision into a kitchen so correspondingly spick and
span that even its silence smelled scoured, rows of tins shining into it.
A dun-colored kind of dusk, soot floating in it, began to filter down the
air-shaft, dimming them.

Mrs. Ross lowered the shade and lighted the gas-jet. So short that in the
long run she wormed first through a crowd, she was full of the genial
curves that, though they bespoke three lumps in her coffee in an elevator
and escalator age, had not yet reached uncongenial proportions. In fact,
now, brushing with her bare forearm across her moistly pink face, she was
like Flora, who, rather than fade, became buxom.

A door slammed in an outer hall, as she was still stirring and looking down
into the stew.

"Edwin!"