"Well," he said, with a great dip of nose down into his smile, "whad can I do for you?" He reminded Lilly of a great auk, something alcidine in the thin cheeks with the mouth cutting so widely toward the ears. She had not realized it, but suddenly the terrible, the impersonal detachment of the past weeks smote her. There had been voiceless days and days when the sound of herself asking direction or ordering from a bill of fare had an element of surprise in it, and the toneless voice of public service was the only one directed to her: "Step lively." "Two blocks east." "Don't mention it." "No more rice pudding left, ma'am." When Isaac Neugass said, "Well, whad can I do for you?" something within her thawed so that she could have cried. "I'm looking for this furnished room," she said, and held out the slip toward him. "You wand my wife," he said, waving her the direction. "Go right outside to the next stoop and ring the bell over Neugass." "Oh, thank you!" she said, suiting her action to his word. "It's a nize room. I could wish it to an early bird to catch it." "That's what I want, a nice, quiet room." "Then you got it," he cried. "It's a room for a needle," his thumb and forefinger indicating an infinitesibly fine point. "A needle?" "So it could hear itself fall." In his own way Mr. Neugass was a jokester, insisting upon the laugh, sitting back upon his figurative haunches, waiting. "Then it is just what I want," said Lilly, giving him his smile, "only I hope it isn't too--" He took to waggling his head, his little kindly eyes illuminated with a sunburst of wrinkles and his voice a festooned chant of rising and falling inflections. "Sa-y, if you can't pay three-fifty, she'll make it three. You doan' need to tell her I told you, but for such a young lady like you, sa-y, the brice in the newspaper doan' always got to be the brice in the hand, ain't it?" She laughed, the irises that had crowded out the gray in her eyes suddenly smaller and back to normal. In the little entrance adjoining, with its line-up of door bells, she pressed the button as directed. A clicking answered her ring, and she had to learn from a child who entered with a dangling pail of milk, that she was to speak upward through a tube above the bell. "About the room?" Yes, she was to come up. She climbed two flights of dark, clean-smelling stairs, and Mrs. Neugass herself opened the door. Mary, Rispah, Cornelia, Monica, Martha Washington, Mrs. Whistler, Margaret Ogilvy, and Mrs. Neugass, blessed be their tribe, must all have had about the same look about the eyes. Masha Neugass was sixty, and looked it. A blue-gingham apron held her in at the waist so that she bulged softly and fatly above and below it.