The streets are straight, the blocks are square, the intersections regular. The shadows are geometry--they dive one hundred stories. It is a gameboard, ruled and sharp by transit here and plummet there, concrete and rectilinear. This we call traffic. It is the way we move on the board. Trucks and taxis playing fast chess to the beat of the Christmas-colored signals. We are a great, free, democratic people whose trains run approximately on time. In this civilization, eight-o'clock children make skip-ropes of rainbows and slide down the balustrades of sunbeams. One contraction of our chamber of commerce ventricle will thrust ten thousand tons of ore from Duluth to Pittsburgh. We rate fireflies in kilowatts. But we hate to see the evening sun go down. Paul Bunyan's ox was blue. So--our hills, the evening in our thoroughfares, our dying lips. Hence, when we talk about rue in these United States, brother, we do it in brass! We put pistons and kilowatts in our lament, grief, sorrow, lostness! We take a breath of our American air and we-the-people burst. That's blues! The mood would have led to God knows what charade in the auditorium of my senses--the multitude of watching, listening "mes" reacting in all their various ways at once; it might have become a ululation you could have heard on Mars--or frozen as if the head of Medusa had come on stage--or, by that third unanimity, blazed into laughter, revolted ecstasy at ecstasy itself. The singing woman stopped. There was a knock. I yelled, "Come in!" relieved--thinking it might be Paul. For more than an hour, now, worry over him had cankered me. (Do you imagine I tell you all that happens, here? I nearly would if I could--it is not that. But the compendium of the eighteen simultaneous trains of consciousness (the intrications and alternations and separate chains that run in a man's mind and that you could see in your own if you tried) would, in a weekend fill up all the books a man might read in his life. I give you hardly the essence, my friend--but only a sample of the aggregate--a biopsy of its own sort.) A knock, then. I realized it was the door in the bedroom. "May I come in?" Yvonne asked. "Certainly." "Your radio's positively shaking the building!" "Turn it down. I hope you won't mind I'm in here--slightly naked." "Oh!" I couldn't see her, or she, me. The rooms waited because she had stopped. "_Slightly!_" "Barely, if you prefer. Barely nude. Covered in a meager depth with rusty water. Concealed in soapy murk, besides. And, in addition, protected by scum. It's hard water, you know--Croton." Presently the radio went down and out--a moron throttled in midspiel. "I'll sit in here," she said. "Any place you like." "I'll bet! I'll bet if you heard me coming--you'd grab the shower curtain--" "Flowers for tonight?" "You certainly have a long, mean memory, Philip Wylie! So that's just what I do bet!" She was approaching. She exclaimed, "What do you mean--soapsuds?"