Mrs. Cregan was looking at the thick china with a sort of aggrieved despondence. (It was almost the expression of a bereaved mother looking at one of her neighbor's children and thinking it a healthy, ugly brat whom nobody would have missed!) She stared at the bare walls and the bare tables of the restaurant, and found the place, by comparison with her own cozy flat, as unhome-like as the waiting-room of a railroad station--the waiting-room of a railroad station when you have said good-bye to your past and the train has not yet arrived to carry you to your future. As her pancakes were served to her, she bent over the plate to hide a tear that trickled down her nose. It splashed on the piece of food that she raised to her mouth. She ate it--tear and all. "An' them no bigger than the top of a tomato can!" Mrs. Byrne was muttering. Mrs. Cregan ate, and the food helped, to stop her tears. It was the strong coffee, at last, that brought her back her voice. "If it'd b'en _him_, he'd 'a' gone an' got drunk," she said, wiping her cheeks with her napkin. "The men have the best of it. Us women have to take it all starin' sober." "They're no more than children," Mrs. Byrne replied, "an' they're to be treated as such. Sure, Cregan couldn't live without yuh. He'd have no buttons to his pants in a week." "An' him!" Mrs. Cregan cried. "Iver, since the Raypublicuns got licked, there's be'n no gettin' on with him at all. Thim Sunday papers 've toorned his head. He's all blather about his rights an' his wrongs. Th' other moornin' didn't I try to get on his bus from the wrong side o' the crossin', an' he bawls at me: 'Th' other side! Th' other side! Yuh're no better than any one ilse!' An' I had to chase through the mud after him! The little wizened runt! He's talkin' like an arnachist! An' that's why he smashed me dish. He'll have no one say 'No' to 'im.... Ah, Mrs. Byrne, niver marry a man older than yersilf." "Thank yuh," Mrs. Byrne replied with hoarse sarcasm. "I'm not likely to, at my age." She added, consolingly: "Cregan's young fer his years. Drivin' a Fift' Avenah bus is fine, preservin', outdoor work." "It is _that!_" And Mrs. Cregan's tone remarked that the fact was the more to be deplored. "He'll be crankier an' crabbeder the older he grows." She dipped to her coffee and swallowed hard. Mrs. Byrne had screwed up her eyes to squint at an idea that could not well be looked in the face. When she spoke it was to say slyly: "God forbid! But they do go off sometimes in a puff. He looks as if he'd live fer long enough, thank Heaven. But yuh never can tell." [Illustration] Mrs. Cregan blinked, held her hand for a moment, and then began hastily to fill her mouth with food. The silence that ensued was long enough to take on an appearance of guilt. It was long enough, too, for Mrs. Byrne to "contrive a procedure."