She and Minnie used to spend whole days in useless shopping. Theirs was a respectable neighbourhood of well-paid artisans, bookkeepers, and small shopkeepers. The women did their own housework in drab garments and soiled boudoir caps that hid a multitude of unkempt heads. They seemed to find a deal of time for amiable, empty gabbling. Any time from seven to four you might see a pair of boudoir caps leaning from opposite bedroom windows, conversing across back porches, pausing in the task of sweeping front steps, standing at a street corner, laden with grocery bundles. Minnie wasted hours in what she called "running over to ma's for a minute." The two quarrelled a great deal, being so nearly of a nature. But the very qualities that combated each other seemed, by some strange chemical process, to bring them together as well. "I'm going downtown to-day to do a little shopping," Minnie would say. "Do you want to come along, ma?" "What you got to get?" "Oh, I thought I'd look at a couple of little dresses for Pearlie." "When I was your age I made every stitch you wore." "Yeh, I bet they looked like it, too. This ain't the farm. I got all I can do to tend to the house, without sewing." "I did it. I did the housework and the sewin' and cookin', an' besides--" "A swell lot of housekeepin' you did. You don't need to tell me." The bickering grew to a quarrel. But in the end they took the downtown L together. You saw them, flushed of face, with twitching fingers, indulging in a sort of orgy of dime spending in the five-and-ten-cent store on the wrong side of State Street. They pawed over bolts of cheap lace and bins of stuff in the fetid air of the crowded place. They would buy a sack of salted peanuts from the great mound in the glass case, or a bag of the greasy pink candy piled in vile profusion on the counter, and this they would munch as they went. They came home late, fagged and irritable, and supplemented their hurried dinner with hastily bought and so-called food from the near-by delicatessen. Thus ran the life of ease for Ben Westerveld, retired farmer. And so we find him lying impatiently in bed, rubbing a nervous forefinger over the edge of the sheet and saying to himself that, well, here was another day. What day was it? Le'see now. Yesterday was--yesterday--a little feeling of panic came over him. He couldn't remember what yesterday had been. He counted back laboriously and decided that to-day must be Thursday. Not that it made any difference. * * * * *