Summer was a full time in the Sales Office of _Delight Drinks Inc._ Even so there came pause. Slack hours lounged in the hot rooms. Rooms, writhed in the dry green blare of the electric lights, burning like sores against the summer’s sultry and drab dampness, came to a halt, jolted against their usual flow, stood glazed and ominous upon the dark grain of Time. As in a crowded car suddenly broken from its speed the passengers congest, fall huddled upon each other, so Fanny’s girls piled heavy moist against the soul of Fanny. She sat at her desk with her hands laid before her. The girls at long tables opened the envelopes of orders, marked blanks and sheets, sorted by geographical location, placed in trays. The girls yawned together ... sudden the girls were One, with moist throat running down in dusty waist, with bare arm brushing sweat from brow, with body crowded lush in a narrow skirt, under narrow table, into narrow shoes. They were a body breathing and sweating in a smoulder of will to lie out naked near a lapping sea under cool winds ... cool lips. She loved the girls. --O if I could show you how I understand! --Why do I understand? Here with these girls, her life could come and she face it. Question no longer. Her life was a way, here, tender and passionate and simple, leading into the hearts of a dozen girls. --I am all open. You do not come in. I am all open. I come into you. “It’s a hot afternoon, girls.” “Gee ... yes!” “What do you say to a round of lemonade?” Surface of scared wills against a whirling world. But here all was quiet and sweet, and all was in herself. She could look at each girl, see a face already bitten and shrunk by the acids of life. But she looked in herself, and each hurt, each struggle was a throb within her ... they were healed. “Good! You, Daisie, you know that Italian’s on the corner? Let’s collect five cents each--only those who want it though! You go out, dear, and bring up a pitcher ... two pitchers.” As Daisie bustled by, she slipped a quarter holding the little calloused hand just long enough to give two messages: “Buy some cookies or something with that” and her heart’s fullness. --What do I understand? now she asked herself as the room waited, spinning in expectancy, released in laughter and jest and stretching of arms from Time. --There is something beautiful ... in the understanding? in what? O life how you hurt! O life, how when one holds you warm and athrob in one’s heart, you are good, hurting!