Mattie came in to light the lamps. The room leapt at me. The scent of narcissus, from a pot of forced growth on the windowsill, was overpoweringly sweet and heavy. It was the smell of spring, of the quickening of the earth; and it was December, and this pot of narcissus was unnatural. That Mattie in her own strangely natural way disliked the thing was evidenced by the scorn with which she sniffed the perfume that with the almost cosmic disregard of plant life fell upon her. “I’ll jes’ open this winder a little ways so’s you won’t be kilt by that stink, Miss Dinah,” she said. And into the scented comfort there poured sound. The radio is the unfailing solace of the American family. None so poor that they cannot turn it on at breakfast and turn it off only when they go to bed. The air is free; but in order to hear the variety of noise for which his soul may be said to yearn there were jobs, even in hard times, to shout “on the air.” The latest breadline of New York wound in and out the doors of the big broadcasting concerns. I cried to Mattie: “Shut the window in a hurry! I’d rather smother.” Mattie said: “Yes’m?” She left the room with eloquent shoulders. Nicholas came with the cocktails. “I think she will be in soon,” he ventured. It was clear that he thought nothing of the sort. “I’ve been thinking over things,” I threw myself into what I had but now decided to avoid. “There’s reason in abundance for Eva being worried, you know. I mean, I know she was very apprehensive about the crashing of banks; and now that it’s happened----” Busy with the cocktails, he cast at me an incredulous look. “My job is to see that she’s not worried.” “She sees it all around her,” I explained. “Her friends are worried sick. The town is on the run.” “New York?” He was still more openly incredulous. “But that’s only temporary, of course.” I was in the mood for considering his civic pride revolting. “So nothing can open your eyes?” “You think, then, that she is really worried? What,” he demanded, still skeptical, “does she see, then, that would so upset her?” “She might have run across what I found myself in the thick of, yesterday,” I threw in the teeth of his laughter. “She didn’t, it happens, see this particular thing; but it isn’t the only shocking sight in town--your prosperous town!” I glared at him; and I saw only the surface of his lightness. “It wouldn’t hurt you, to be thrown out to hunt a job for yourself!” I said hatefully. His mirth stopped as suddenly as if he had turned off a spigot. “Did you never hear of keeping up one’s courage by making fun?” he asked gently. “No, Dinah: I’m--I’m scared to death. And I’m frightened over something so much more vital than money, so much more necessary than a job: happiness with one’s wife.”