reached the butcher shop; had almost gone by it. "How do you do, Mrs. Farley? Nice warm weather we're having." The butcher had a hooked nose and when he smiled it seemed to press down his thick brown mustache that framed his even white teeth so beautifully. He settled his apron over his stomach and gazed at her hungrily and affectionately above the glass top of the counter as though he were trying to hypnotize her into buying some of the coral pink sausages which reposed beside a block of ice in the transparent case. The meat shop was as white as death. It smelt of blood and sawdust and its tiled interior offered a refuge from the heat without. "I want a piece of--can you give me a nice rib roast today--? No! What do you ask for those hens?" Mrs. Farley, as always, hesitated when she spoke and lines as fine as hairs traced themselves on her pale, dry, hastily powdered forehead. Her vague, rather squinting eyes traveled undecidedly over the big pieces of meat: the shoulders, the forelegs, the haunches, of different shades of red streaked with tallow or suet, that swung on hooks in the shadow against the gray-white tiling of the walls. The fowls dangled in a row a little to the fore of the meat. The feet of the hens were a sickly bluish yellow, and the toes, cramped together yet flaccid, still suggested the fatigue which follows agony. The eyes bulged under thin blue-tinged lids and on the heads and necks about the close-shut beaks bunches of reddish brown feathers had been left as decorations. The butcher took one down and, laying it on the counter, pinched up the plump flesh between his forefinger and thumb. "You could never find a better fed hen than that," he told her. "Nice firm solid meat. You see they are just in and I was so sure of getting rid of them I did not even put them on the ice yet. They're not storage fowls. I buy them from a young man who has a farm out near where my sister lives at Southbridge." Mrs. Farley, in spite of a gala occasion and the fact that Mr. and Mrs. Price were to do her the condescension of coming to dinner at her house the next day, had not intended to buy anything so expensive as chicken. For all those people it would take two hens. But though she tried her best not to allow the butcher to catch her eye, she knew he was staring at her intently and that the white teeth were flashing almost cruelly under the brown mustache beneath the hooked nose. It heightened a conviction of weakness which she never failed to experience when she was called upon to decide anything, especially in the presence of other people, and she wished she had asked Alice to buy the meat before she went to work. Of course Alice would spend too much but what she got was sure to be nice and the diners were certain to praise it.