A few crinkles, frequent with him of late, came out in rays from his eyes. "Is it anything you--you couldn't say in front of ma?" "Yes." He inserted two fingers into his collar, rearing back his head. "Anything wrong, Clara?" "You mean is anything right." They rode in silence after that, both of them reading in three colors the border effulgencies of frenzied advertising. But when they emerged to a quieter up-town night that was already pointed with a first star, he took her arm as they turned off into a side-street that was architecturally a barracks to the eye, brownstone front after brownstone front after brownstone front. Block after block of New York's side-streets are sunk thus in brown study. "You mustn't be so ready to be put out over every little thing I say, Clara. Is it anything wrong to want you up at the house just as often as we can get you?" "No, Sam; it ain't that." "Well then, what is it?" "Oh, what's the use beginning all that again? I want to begin to-night where we usually leave off." "Is it--is it something we've talked about before, Clara?" "Yes--and no. We've talked so much and so long without ever getting anywheres--what's the difference whether we've ever talked it before or not?" "You just wait, Clara; everything is going to come out fine for us." Her upper lip lifted slightly. "Yes," she said; "I've heard that before." "We're going to be mighty happy some day, just the same, and don't you let yourself forget it. We've got good times ahead." "Oh dear!" she sighed out. "What?" "Nothing." He patted her arm. "You'll never know, Clara, the torture it's been for me even your going out those few times with Eddie Leonard has put me through. You're mine, Clara; a hundred Eddies couldn't change that." "Who said anybody wanted to change it?" He patted her arm again very closely. "You're a wonderful girl, Clara." They turned up the stoop of Mrs. Schulem's boarding-house, strictly first-class. How they flourish in the city, these institutions of the Not Yet, the Never Was, the Never Will Be, and the Has Been! They are the half-way houses going up and the mausoleums coming down life's incline, and he who lingers is lost to the drab destiny of this or that third-floor-back hearthstone, hot and cold running water, all the comforts of home. That is why, even as she moved up from the rooming to the boarding-house and down from the third-floor back to the second-story front, there was always under Clara Bloom's single bed the steamer-trunk scarcely unpacked, and in her heart the fear that, after all, this might not be transiency, but home. That is why, too, she paid her board by the week and used printed visiting-cards.