"Don't cry, baby," said the emboldened chauffeur, placing the small pasteboard box up beside her. * * * * * In the great old-fashioned room in Fortieth Street--of two beds and two decades ago--she finally in complete exhaustion slid into her white iron cot against the wall, winding an alarm-clock and placing it on the floor beside her. Long before Miss Sylvette de Long, with her eyelids very dark, tiptoed in, and, rubbing the calves of her legs in alcohol, undressed in the dark, she was asleep, her mouth still moist and quivering like a child's. At nine-thirty and with dirty daylight cluttering up the cluttered room, the alarm-clock, full of heinous vigor, bored like an awl into the morning. THE END