"Of course not, you little fool.... Please go away, it's my time to practice. I don't love anyone that way." Her eyes were dilated and burning. The kimono had fallen from one shoulder and showed the beginning of the curve of a breast. Her long fingers dug into the flesh of his shoulder. His back was against the door. "O this is fearful, Nan." The hat in his hand, red gleam of varnish on the door closing behind him. Then stairs again, numbered doors, milk bottles, newspapers. He brushed against the elevator man, whose eyes rolled white in a black face, and through the glass door where climbed the letters of Swansea in reverse, and out into the grey street. As he crossed a truck nearly hit him. A man with a grease smudge on an unshaven cheek under a shiny visored cap leaned out snarling: "Wanter git kilt ye sonofabitch?" Sure I want to git kilt, sure I want to git kilt. ... Wenny picked his way very carefully across a snowpile and sat hunched on a bench under a skinny tree. Anything to forget Nan, her ringing voice saying: Of course not, you little fool, the warm curve of her breast, the down in the hollow of her back under the green crepe. He beat against his forehead with his fists. O he'd go mad if he didn't stop thinking of her. Anything to stop thinking of her. Death to stop thinking of her, death a motortruck hurtling down the frozen street and a voice shrieking: Wanter git kilt ye sonofabitch, and hard blackness, eternal. To crawl into bed and draw the covers up to your chin and sleep. That's what it would be like to git kilt. No more agony of hands to touch, lips to kiss, so downy and warm it would be asleep in a bed of blackness. The back of the bench was hard against the nape of his neck. He was shivering. He got to his feet. The sky had become overcast with dovecolored mackerel clouds that cast a violet gloom over the apartment houses and the etched trees and the rutted yellow slush of the street. Wenny tugged at his watchfob. The familiar round face, slender Roman numbers. God, only half past nine? How many hours ahead. He walked on numbly. * * * * "Some cold, aint it?" came a voice beside him. "Aint no time for keepin' the benches warm." Wenny turned his head. Beside him on the bench was a fellow without an overcoat of about his own age, a compact, snubnosed face with lips blue and a little trembling from the cold. It was afternoon; he was sitting on the Common. "Of course it's cold," said Wenny testily. He was staring straight before him through the trees at the dark shapes of people and automobiles passing in front of the shopwindows, gay and glinting along Tremont Street. Like that his thoughts passed and repassed, miserable silhouettes against the shine and color of his memories. It hurt him to leave the mood of processional sadness he had slipped into at the end of dumb hours of walking. After a long silence the man at the other end of the bench continued in the same confidential tone.