Peter was still talking. “It really came out of a clear sky. Until very lately I should have said that Hy and I were friends. As you know, we had many points of contact. Last fall, when--” The Worm turned. “Passing lightly over the next eight months,” he remarked, “what do you propose to do now?” Peter shrank back a little. The Worm's manner was hardly ingratiating. “Why--” he said, “why, I suppose I'll stay on here. You and I have always got on, Henry. We've been comfortable here. And to tell the truth, I've been getting tired of listening to the history in detail of Hy's amours. He wants to look out, that fellow. He's had a few too many of 'em. He's getting careless. Now you and I, we're both sober, quiet. We were the backbone of the Seventh-Story Men. We can go on--” The Worm, though given to dry and sometimes cryptic ways, was never rude. That is he never had been. But at this point he walked out of the apartment and closed the door behind him. He had come in with the intention of using the telephone. Instead now he walked swiftly through the Square and on across Sixth Avenue, under the elevated road into Greenwich Village, where the streets twist curiously, and the hopeless poor swarm in the little triangular parks, and writers and painters and sculptors and agitators and idea-venders swarm in the quaint tumble-down old houses and the less quaint apartment buildings. He entered one of the latter, pressed one of a row of buttons under a row of brass mouthpieces. The door clicked. He opened it; walked through to the rear door on the right. This door opened slowly, disclosing a tall young woman, very light in coloring, of a softly curving outline, seeming to bend and sway even as she stood quietly there; charming to the eye even in the half-light, fresh of skin, slow, non-committal in speech and of quietly yielding ways; a young woman with large, almost beautiful, inexpressive eyes. She wore hat and gloves and carried a light coat. “You just caught me,” she said. On the floor by the wall was a hand-bag. Henry Bates eyed this. “Oh,” he murmured, distrait, “going away!” “Why--yes. You wanted me?” “Yes. It's about Sue Wilde.” She hesitated; then led him into the half-furnished living-room. “Where is Sue, anyway?” “When I left her she wras trying to make a fire in a kitchen range. Out in Jersey.” “But what on earth--” “Trouble was she didn't understand about the damper in the pipe. I fixed that.” Betty glanced covertly at her wrist watch. “I don't want to appear unsympathetic,” she said, “but I don't see why she undertakes to shoulder that family. It's--it's quixotic. It's not her sort of thing. She's got her own life to live.” The Worm, very calm but a little white about the mouth, confronted her. Betty moved restlessly. “She wants you to pack up her things,” he said. “Sent me to ask.”