Mabel used to bring her friends to the flat to cheer her up, as she used to say, and when she had filled the room she had chosen as her sitting-room (the garret was not cozy enough for Mabel) with a scented mob of chattering women, she would fix upon one of them as the object of her jealousy, accusing Henry of having looked at her all the evening. There would sometimes be a scene at the moment when half the mob would cluster around Mabel to console her outraged feelings and the rest of it would hover about her rival to assure her she was guiltless. Sylvia, standing sullenly apart, would ponder the result of throwing a lighted lamp into the middle of the sickly sobbing pandemonium. The quarrel was not so bad as the inevitable reconciliation afterward, with its profuse kissing and interminable explanations that seemed like an orchestra from which Mabel emerged with a plaintive solo that was the signal for the whole scene to be lived over again in maddeningly reiterated accounts from all the women talking at once. Worse even than such evenings were those when Mabel restrained, or rather luxuriously hoarded up, her jealousy until the last visitor had departed; for then through half the night Sylvia must listen to her pouring over Henry a stream of reproaches which he would weakly try to divert by arguments or more weakly try to dam with caresses. Such methods of treatment usually ended in Mabel's dressing herself and rushing from the bedroom to leave the flat forever. Unfortunately she never carried out her threat. "Why don't you go?" Sylvia once asked, when Mabel was standing by the door, fully dressed, with heaving breast, making no effort to turn the handle. "These shoes hurt me," said Mabel. "He knows I can't go out in these shoes. The heartless brute!" "If you knew those shoes hurt, why did you put them on?" Sylvia asked, scornfully. "I was too much upset by Harry's treatment of me. Oh, whatever shall I do? I'm so miserable." Whereupon Mabel collapsed upon the mat and wept black tears, until Henry came and tried to lift her up, begging her not to stay where she might catch cold. "You know when a jelly won't set?" Sylvia said, when she was recounting the scene to Monkley afterward. "Well, she was just like a jelly and father simply couldn't make her stand up on the plate." Jimmy laughed sardonically. These continued altercations between Mabel and Henry led to altercations with their neighbors underneath, who complained of being kept awake at night. The landlord, a fiery little Jew, told them that what between the arrears of rent and the nuisance they were causing to his other tenants he would have to give them notice. Sylvia could never get any money for the purposes of housekeeping except from Jimmy, and when she wanted clothes it was always Jimmy whom she must ask. "Let's go away," she said to him one day. "Let's leave them here together." Monkley looked at her in surprise. "Do you mean that?" "Of course I mean it."