"You got out of that lucky."

Tillie rose and tied a gingham apron over her white one.

"I guess so. Only sometimes--"

"I don't know as it would have been so wrong. He ain't young, and I ain't.
And we're not getting any younger. He had nice manners; he'd have been
good to me."

Mrs. McKee's voice failed her. For a moment she gasped like a fish. Then:

"And him a married man!"

"Well, I'm not going to do it," Tillie soothed her. "I get to thinking
about it sometimes; that's all. This new fellow made me think of him.
He's got the same nice way about him."

Aye, the new man had made her think of him, and June, and the lovers who
lounged along the Street in the moonlit avenues toward the park and love;
even Sidney's pink roses. Change was in the very air of the Street that
June morning. It was in Tillie, making a last clutch at youth, and
finding, in this pale flare of dying passion, courage to remember what she
had schooled herself to forget; in Harriet asserting her right to live her
life; in Sidney, planning with eager eyes a life of service which did not
include Joe; in K. Le Moyne, who had built up a wall between himself and
the world, and was seeing it demolished by a deaf-and-dumb book agent whose
weapon was a pencil pad!