Jerry’s lashes flickered, but she remained sitting in the same position, knees drawn against her chin, pink mules flapping in front of her. “It never wandered into my bean until just now, when I came in and saw——But I’ve been boiling the idea down—and I think you’d better.” “Jerry!” “You aren’t happy here; I—I guess you never have been. I’ve never done anything but harm to you from the first moment I knew you. God knows I didn’t mean to, but it seems my good intentions always make the smoothest kind of boulevards for the joy-riders in hell.” Jerry broke the silence that followed her last speech. “Joy—I’ve never told you about myself. Get comfortable now, because I’m going to ladle out the whole story.” Joy was at the threshold of the Blue Room, of what she had always wanted to know. And now that she was so near, she drew back. “Oh, no, Jerry—please don’t tell me anything you’d rather not talk about—and you’ve often said you’d rather not talk about that——” “I also said I’d tell you sometime when I felt like it. Now gets the vote. I should have told you right at the start—but I didn’t, because I didn’t want to go into it. Now I’ve got to.” “Well, if you must tell me—I’m comfortable,” said Joy in a small voice, sitting down on one of the black walnut chairs which had been remodeled with black-and-white-striped cushions. VI ” To begin at the pop of the pistol—I was born in New York—over on the East Side, where people live like flies. You’ve never been there, have you?” Joy shook her head. “Then you probably won’t believe some of the things I’m going to tell you. I was one of ten—and we all lived in two rooms.” Jerry’s voice seemed to have grown dull, and she stared away from Joy as she talked. “When you toss it over in your mind—it’s pretty brutalizing, living that way—it tends to turn humans into worse than animals—for humans can make themselves as much lower than animals as they can higher—that’s one of the things I’ve learned so far in life.” “You don’t mean _ten people_—in two rooms?” Joy gasped. Jerry shrugged her shoulders. “That’s exactly what I do mean. Not only that, but we took two boarders in our rooms because my father was always out of work.” Joy’s eyes were huge disks of horror; already she had shrunk into her chair looking at Jerry as if she had suddenly dropped in from Mars. Jerry was continuing rapidly: