Charity felt that she had plumbed the depths of degradation in listening to a quarrel between such a creature and her maid. What must it be to be the maid of such a creature! She was about to snatch away the earpiece when she heard the noise of a door opening. She looked toward the entrance of the room she was in, but the door that opened was in the other room in the other building. The voices of Zada and her maid stopped jangling, and she heard the most familiar of all voices asking: “What's the row to-day?” There was an extra metal in the timbre and it had the effect of an old phonographic record, but there was no questioning whose voice it was. Zada's voice became audibly low in answer. “She is such a fool she drives me crazy.” A sullen, servile voice answered: “It ain't me's the fool, and as for crazy--her wantin' me to bring home what they ain't in no market. How'm I goin' to git what ain't to be got, I asts you. This here war is stoppin' ev'y kind of food.” Cheever's answer was characteristic. He didn't believe in servants' rights. “Get out. If you're impudent again I'll throw you out, and your baggage after you.” “Yassar,” was the soft answer. There was the sound of shuffling feet and a softly closed door. Then Zada's voice, very mellow: “I thought you'd never come, dearie.” “Awfully busy to-day, honey.” “You took dinner with her, of course.” “No. It was a big day on the Street, and there was so much to do at the office that I dined down-town at the Bankers' Club with several men and then went back to the office. I ought to be there all night, but I couldn't keep away from you any longer.” There were mysterious quirks of sound that meant kisses and sighs and tender inarticulations. There were cooing tones which the dictagraph repeated with hideous fidelity. Zada asked, “Did he have hard daydie old office-ums?” And he answered, with infatuated imbecility, “Yes, he diddums, but worst was lonelying for his Zadalums.” “Did Peterkin miss his Zadalums truly--truly?” The inveterate idioms of wooers took on in Charity's ear a grotesque obscenity, a sacrilegious burlesque of words as holy to her as prayer or the sacred dialect of priests. When Zada murmured, “Kissings! kissings!” Charity screamed: “Stop it, you beasts! You beasts!” Then she clapped her hand over her lips, expecting to hear their panic at her outcry. But they were as oblivious of her pain or her rage as if an interplanetary space divided them. They went on with the murmur and susurrus of their communion, while Charity looked askance at the three men. They could not hear, but could imagine, and they stared at her doltishly. “Leave the room! Go away!” she groaned. They slipped out through the door and left her to her shame. In the porches of her ear the hateful courtship purled on with its tender third-personal terms and its amorous diminutives, suffixed ridiculously. “Zada was afaid her booful Peterkin had forgotten her and gone to the big old house.”