six-dollar-a-week stenographer filled her drinking-tumbler with water
and placed it, with two pansies floating atop, beside her typewriting
machine. In Wall Street an apple-woman with the most ancient face in the
world leaned out of her doorway with a new offering, forced but firm
strawberries that caught a backward glance from the passing tide of
finders and keepers, losers and weepers. Two sparrows hopped in and out
among the stone gargoyles of a municipal building. A dray-driver cursed
at the snarl of traffic and flecked the first sweat from his horse's
flanks. A gaily striped awning drooped across the front of the White
Flag steamship offices, and out from its entrance, spring in her face,
emerged Miss Miriam Binswanger; at her shoulder Irving Shapiro attended.

"Honest, Mr. Shapiro, I--I just don't know what I would have done except
for you."

"I told you Harry Mansbach would fix you up."

She clasped her wrist-bag carefully over the bulk of a thick envelope
and turned her shining face full upon him.

"On deck A, too, right with the best!"

He steered her by a light pressure of her arm into the up-town flux of
the sidewalk. "If I was a right smart kind of a fellow I never would
have helped you to get those cabins."

"Oh, Mr. Shapiro!"

"But that's me every time, always working against myself."