below out of sight, but who permeates her small flat like a malignant
influence.... Hear the whistling of the dumb-waiter!... Eggs are
demanded, authoritatively, bitterly. If glances could kill, not only
that flat but the whole house would be strewn with corpses.... Eggs!...

Something happens, something arrives, something snaps; a spell is broken
and horror is let loose. "Take your eggs!" cries the tiny wife, in a
passion. The eggs fly across the table, and the front of a man's suit is
ruined. She sits down and fairly weeps, appalled at herself. Last
evening she was punishing males; this morning she turns eggs into
missiles, she a loving, an ambitious, an intensely respectable young
wife! As for him, he sits motionless, silent, decorated with the colors
of eggs, a graduate of a famous university. Calamity has brought him
also to his senses. Still weeping, she puts on her hat and jacket.
"Where are you going?" he asks, solemnly, no longer homicidal, no longer
hungry. "I must hurry to the cleaners for your other suit!" says she,
tragic. And she hurries....

A shocking story, a sordid story, you say. Not a bit! They are young;
they have the incomparable virtue of youthfulness. It is naught, all
that! The point of the story is that it illustrates New York--a New York
more authentic than the spaciousness of upper Fifth Avenue or the
unnatural dailiness of grand hotels. I like it.

* * * * *

You may see that couple later in a suburban house--a real home for the
time being, with a colorable imitation of a garden all about it, and the
"finest suburban railway service in the world": the whole being a frame
and environment for the rearing of children. I have sat at dinner in