“I have lost my friendship with gutters,” mused Geroid, looking down as he walked. “They quarrel with bits of orange peel and pins. Patiently they wait for the red rain that men give them every two hundred years. Brown and red always sweep toward each other. Men are often unknowingly killed by these two huge colours treading the insects upon a path and walking to an ultimate trysting-place.” The little girl whose face was like a molasses crescent cut off one of her yellow curls and hung it from her closed mouth. “Why are you acting in this way?” asked Geroid. “It’s something I’ve never done before,” she answered placidly. Geroid stroked his raspberry beard with menacing longing but could not quite induce himself to pull it off. It would have been like cutting the throat of his mistress. They passed an insincerely littered courtyard, tame beneath its gray tatters, and saw a black cat chasing a yellow cat. “A cat never eats a cat--goldfish and dead lions are more to his taste,” said Geroid. “Indulgently he flees from other cats or pursues them in turn.” “I see that you dislike melodrama,” observed a bulbous woman in penitent lavender, who was beating a carpet in the courtyard. “You’re mistaken. Melodrama is a weirdly drunken plausibility and can not sincerely be disliked,” said Geroid. “But I must not leave without complimenting your lavender wrapper. Few people have mastered the art of being profoundly ridiculous.” “I can see that you’re trying to be ridiculously profound,” said the woman as she threw a bucket of stale water at Geroid. He fled down the street, dragging the child with him. They left the cumbersome sterility of the city behind them and passed into the suburbs. “Here we have a tragedy in shades of naked inertness,” said Geroid to the little girl. “I don’t quite understand you,” answered the little girl. “I see nothing but scowls and brownness.” A tree stood out like the black veins on an unseen fist. A square house raised its toothless snarl and all the other houses were jealous imitators. Wooden fences crossed each other with dejected, mathematical precision. A rat underneath a veranda scuffled with an empty candy box. The green of dried grasses spread out like poisonous impotence. “Here is the house where my mother lies dead,” said the little girl. Her father--peace germinating into greasy overalls--came down the steps. His blue eyes were parodies on the sky--discs of sinisterly humourous blue; his face reminded one of a pear that had been stepped on--resiliently flattened. “I have come to measure your wife for her coffin,” said Geroid Latour. “You’ll find her at the bottom of the well in the back-yard,” answered the man. “Trying to cheat a poor old undertaker out of his business!” said Latour, waggishly. “No, I’ll leave that to death,” said the man. “Come inside and warm your candour.” “No, thank you, shrieks travel faster through the open air,” said Geroid, squinting at the man’s sportively cerulean eyes.