“I’m working now as a waitress in a little cafeteria on Winthrop street. Eight in the morning to three in the afternoon. Two afternoons a week off. These burns on my hands come from the hot coffee. On the two afternoons I write poetry. My body, you see, passes into a less visible conduct, and thoughts rattle more effectively than china cups. Then, on the next morning, I am forced to recollect that life is in a continual conspiracy to prevent this transformation of manners. The plates are once more held up. Beans and roast beef refuse to betray the secret.” They had reached the studio and were seated opposite to each other. “And I work every morning in a tobacco shop,” said Carl. “Since life works with ravishing incongruities, everything there should be burned except the cigars. Meditating on this, I am able to wait more peacefully on the customers. Cringing sounds slip from my lips. ‘Yes, MacLane will win the next fight and the weather is terrible.’ Strange, twisted little payments of sound. Life clinks them in his empty purse.” “Be romantic--make it the brave bow to an indelicate dream,” said Olga. “A background of colored compensations? They, too, are endurable if you don’t turn your head too often.” The adventure of stealing from a cautious world to an alcove of unguarded expression changed their physical desires into brightly unheeded guests lurking just outside of their longing to talk to each other. When their hands touched at last, they laughed at the minute surprise tendered by their flesh. They became two secret isolations examining a velvet hallucination of fusion. Their bodies touched while investigating this enticing dream. CHAPTER XV. The winter bickered with spring; days gave their imaginary separation of time; Olga and Carl stooped to the task of conjuring myriads of fancifully plausible tongues from their dream of perished identities lost in one search. Then Olga left with a theater company that was about to tour the middle west, having managed to secure the small part of a garrulous chambermaid, and Carl glided into a riot of writing, waiting for the telegram that would send him to join her in a far western city where her company would stage its last performances. In the meantime, he resolved to visit a wealthy uncle who lived in the south and wanted to see this “queer nephew of mine, who scribbles poetry and doesn’t care about making money.” As he sat one morning in an elevated railroad coach, with valises at his side, commencing the journey to the city in which his uncle lived, his mood was glittering and aimless. He danced with outlines of Olga’s words; hummed briskly saccharine tunes; and trifled with the contours of people seated near him. Across the aisle a fatly rosy man was reading a newspaper and Carl’s gaze idly struck the front page and absorbed the headlines. In a corner of the page he came to the words: “Actress Dies in M----.”