Then there was the window. Ma Minick liked it open wide. Old man Minick, who rather prided himself on his modernism (he called it being up to date) was distrustful of the night air. In the folds of its sable mantle lurked a swarm of dread things--colds, clammy miasmas, fevers. "Night air's just like any other air," Ma Minick would say, with some asperity. Ma Minick was no worm; and as modern as he. So when they went to bed the window would be open wide. They would lie there, the two old ones, talking comfortably about commonplace things. The kind of talk that goes on between a man and a woman who have lived together in wholesome peace (spiced with occasional wholesome bickerings) for more than forty years. "Remind me to see Gerson to-morrow about that lock on the basement door. The paper's full of burglars." "If I think of it." She never failed to. "George and Nettie haven't been over in a week now." "Oh, well, young folks.... Did you stop in and pay that Koritz the fifty cents for pressing your suit?" "By golly, I forgot again! First thing in the morning." A sniff. "Just smell the Yards." It was Chicago. "Wind must be from the west." Sleep came with reluctant feet, but they wooed her patiently. And presently she settled down between them and they slept lightly. Usually, some time during the night, he awoke, slid cautiously and with infinite stealth from beneath the covers and closed the wide-flung window to within a bare two inches of the sill. Almost invariably she heard him; but she was a wise old woman; a philosopher of parts. She knew better than to allow a window to shatter the peace of their marital felicity. As she lay there, smiling a little grimly in the dark and giving no sign of being awake, she thought, "Oh, well, I guess a closed window won't kill me either." Still, sometimes, just to punish him a little, and to prove that she was nobody's fool, she would wait until he had dropped off to sleep again and then she, too, would achieve a stealthy trip to the window and would raise it slowly, carefully, inch by inch. "How did that window come to be open?" he would say in the morning, being a poor dissembler. "Window? Why, it's just the way it was when we went to bed." And she would stoop to pick up the pillow that lay on the floor.