"It's like I keep saying to myself, Kess. If--if he'd ask me anything, it--it would be different. He--he says he never felt so satisfied that a woman had the right stuff in her. And I have! There's nothing in the world can take that away from me. I can give him what he wants. I know I can. Why, the way I'll make up to that little girl out there and love her to death! I ask so little, Kess--just a decent life and rest--peace. I'm tired. I want to let myself get fat. I'm built that way, to get fat. It was nothing but diet gave me the anaemia last summer. He says he wants me to plump out. Perfect thirty-six don't mean nothing in his life except for the trade. No more rooming-houses with the kitchenette in the bath-room. A kitchen, he says, Kess, half the size of the show-room, with a butler's pantry. He likes to play pinochle at night, he says, next to the sitting-room fire. He tried to learn me the rules of the game the other night in the poppy-room. It's easy. His first wife was death on flowers. She used to train roses over their back fence. He loved to see her there. He wants me to like to grow them. He wants to take me back to a home of my own and peace, where life can't look to a girl like a devil with horns. He wants to take me home. What'll I do, Kess? Please, please, what'll I do?" He was rather inarticulate, but reached out to pat her arm. "Go--to it--girl, and--God bless you!" * * * * * Forest Park Boulevard comes in sootily, smokestacks, gas-tanks, and large areas of scarred vacant lots boding ill enough for its destiny. But after a while, where Taylor Avenue bisects, it begins to retrieve itself. Here it is parked down its center, a narrow strip set out in shrubs, and on either side, traffic, thus divided, flows evenly up and down a macadamized roadway. In summer the shrubs thicken, half concealing one side of Forest Park Boulevard from its other. Houses suddenly take on detached and architectural importance, often as not a gravel driveway dividing lawns, and out farther still, where the street eventually flows into Forest Park, the Italian Renaissance invades, somebody's rococo money's worth. I.W. Goldstone's home, so near the park that, in spring, the smell of lilacs and gasolene hovers over it, pretends not to period or dynasty. Well detached, and so far back from the sidewalk that interlocking trees conceal its second-story windows, an alcove was frankly a bulge on its red-brick exterior. Where the third-floor bath-room, an afterthought, led off the hallway, it jutted out, a shingled protuberance on the left end of the house. A tower swelled out of its front end, and all year round geraniums and boxed climbing vines bloomed in its three stories.