Monday noon found them lunching together in the tea room. Joe spoke very distantly and formally to Mary Louise when once she came in, looked around at the tables, and then disappeared in the mysterious regions behind. Tuesday night they went on a moonlight picnic on a large river steamer and got back at half-past one. There had been a blissful hour of drifting black shadows, of gleaming ripples, and the heavy sonorous exhaust of benign boilers, spent on the topmost step of the pilot-house stairs, with a moon that dipped and swam in a turgid sea of drifting clouds. The rest had been rattle and bang of jazz and chatter, and bumping about on a hot, swaying floor into obstreperous shoulders, and the smell of sweetened popcorn and fresh paint and sickly perfume. Wednesday they went for a ride again and ended up at the "Ferry" and danced and drank lemonade. And they passed a table where sat old Mrs. LeMasters with a youngish boy with a very red, sunburned face, and she wagged her finger at Joe and looked long and critically at Myrtle. Thursday night he stayed home and felt solitarily virtuous. On Friday a picnic had been arranged. Joe "knocked off" work at four o'clock and went home and dressed by a window through which the sun streamed broiling hot. Before putting on his shoes he yielded to the lure of the bed and flung himself upon it. It was all he could do to drag himself forth and put on the finishing touches. Somehow the notion of the picnic did not thrill him. There would be the same crowd on hand, noisy, obstreperous, vulgar. They had no real "punch" to them. They were like beating a tin pan: all of it was right on the surface. He arrived twenty minutes late and was scolded. They loaded a stack of baskets into his car; all about his feet were cumbersome bundles; and they scratched the polished panel in the tonneau behind the front seat. He could hear the grating of the straw basket across the beautiful surface and he shrank from the sound. Into the seat beside him clambered the soft, fattish girl. Her name was Penny, he had learned. She smirked at him as she adjusted her skirts. There was a line of tiny beady perspiration upon her upper lip and her white slippers gaped at the sides and were not too clean. Her pink georgette crepe waist clung to a flabby back with a suggestion of dampness and she simpered at him: "I hope Myrtle won't put poison in my ice-tea." He confessed that that would distress him exceedingly.