night when she was joking him to buy a ten-dollar carnation for the
Convalescent Home Bazaar, that he would only take one if it was white,
because little white flowers reminded him of Alma Samstag."

"Oh, mamma!"

"Say, it is as plain as the nose on your face. He can't keep his eyes
off you. He sells goods to Doctor Gronauer's clinic and he says the same
thing about him. It makes me so happy, Alma, to think you won't have to
hold him off any more."

"I'll never leave you. Never!"

Nevertheless, she was the first to drop off to sleep, pink there in the
dark with the secret of her blushes.

Then for Mrs. Samstag the travail set in. Lying there with her raging
head tossing this way and that on the heated pillow, she heard with
cruel awareness the minutiae, all the faint but clarified noises that
can make a night seem so long. The distant click of the elevator
depositing a nighthawk. A plong of the bedspring. Somebody's cough. A
train's shriek. The jerk of plumbing. A window being raised. That creak
which lies hidden in every darkness, like a mysterious knee joint. By
three o'clock she was a quivering victim to these petty concepts, and
her pillow so explored that not a spot but was rumpled to the aching lay
of he cheek.

Once Alma, as a rule supersensitive to her mother's slightest unrest,
floated up for the moment out of her young sleep, but she was very
drowsy and very tired, and dream tides were almost carrying her back as