"I'm all right," she said, steadying herself, smilingly, shamefacedly, but relaxing gratefully enough to the flung support. "Don't be afraid, Stella," he said. "I'm here. I'm here." His forearm where the cuff had ridden up bore a scar, as if molten lead had run a fiery, a dagger-shaped, an excoriating course. WHITE GOODS On a slope a white sprinkling of wood anemones lay spread like a patch of linen bleaching in the sun. From a valley a lark cut a swift diagonal upward with a coloratura burst of song. A stream slipped its ice and took up its murmur where it had left off. A truant squelched his toes in the warm mud and let it ooze luxuriantly over and between them. A mole stirred in its hole, and because spring will find a way, even down in the bargain basement of the Titanic Store, which is far below the level of the mole, Sadie Barnet, who had never seen a wood anemone and never sniffed of thaw or the wet wild smell of violets, felt the blood rise in her veins like sap, and across the aisle behind the white-goods counter Max Meltzer writhed in his woolens, and Sadie Barnet, presiding over a bin of specially priced mill-ends out mid-aisle between the white goods and the muslin underwear, leaned toward him, and her smile was as vivid as her lips. "Say, Max, guess why I think you're like a rubber band." Classic Delphi was never more ready with ambiguous retort. Behind a stack of Joy-of-the-Loom bed-sheets, Max Meltzer groped for oracular divination, and his heart-beats fluttered in his voice. "Like a rubber band?" "Yeh." "Give up." "Aw, give a guess." "Well, I don't know, Miss Sadie, unless--unless it's because I'm stuck on you." Do not, ascetic reader, gag at the unsocratic plane. True, Max Meltzer had neither the grain nor the leisure of a sophist, a capacity for tenses or an appreciation of Kant. He had never built a bridge, led a Bible class, or attempted the first inch of the five-foot bookshelf. But on a two-figure salary he subscribed an annual donation to a skin-and-cancer hospital, wore non-reversible collars, and maintained a smile that turned upward like the corners of a cycle moon. Remember, then, ascetic reader, that a rich man once kicked a leper; Kant's own heart, that it might turn the world's heart outward, burst of pain; and in the granite canyon of Wall Street, one smile in every three-score and ten turns upward. Sadie Barnet met Max Meltzer's cycle-moon smile with the blazing eyes of scorn, and her lips, quivering to a smile, met in a straight line that almost ironed out the curves. "'Cause you're stuck on me! That's a swell guess. Gee! you're as funny as a sob, you are." The words scuttered from her lips like sharp hailstones and she glanced at him sidewise over a hump of uplifted shoulder and down the length of one akimbo arm. "'Cause you're stuck on me! Huh!" Max Meltzer leaned across a counter display of fringed breakfast napkins. "Ain't that a good reason, Miss Sadie? It's a true one."