“Hand me the spoon when you’re done,” she said.

They sat smacking their lips in the dark, with only the one small moth-bulb lit.

Tickety-tickety-tick-tick-tick.

They heard footsteps on their sidewalk. Up the front porch stairs. The bell ringing.

They both stiffened.

The bell rang again.

They sat in the dark.

Six more times the bell rang.

“Let’s not answer,” they both said. Startled again, they looked at each other, gasping.

They stared across the room into each other’s eyes.

“It can’t be anyone important.”

“No one important. They’d want to talk. And we’re tired, aren’t we?”

“Pretty,” she said.

The bell rang.

There was a tinkle as Mr. Alexander took another spoonful of peppermint syrup. His wife drank some water and a white pill.

The bell rang a final, hard, time.

“I’ll just peek,” he said, “out of the front window.”

He left his wife and went to look. And there, on the front porch, his back turned, going down the steps was Samuel Spaulding. Mr. Alexander couldn’t remember his face.

Mrs. Alexander was in the other front room, looking out of a window, secretly. She saw a Thimble Club woman walking along the street now, turning in at the sidewalk, coming up just as the man who had rung the bell, was coming down. They met. Their voices murmured out there in the calm spring night.

The two strangers glanced up at the dark house together, discussing it.

Suddenly, the two strangers laughed.

They gazed at the dim house once more. Then the man and the woman walked down the sidewalk and away together, along the street, under the moonlit trees, laughing and shaking their heads and talking until they were out of sight.

Back in the living room Mr. Alexander found his wife had put out a small washtub of warm water in which, mutually, they might soak their feet. She had also brought in an extra bottle of arnica. He heard her washing her hands. When she returned from the bath, her hands and face smelled of soap instead of spring verbena.

They sat soaking their feet.

“I think we better turn in these tickets we bought for that play Saturday night,” he said, “and the tickets for that benefit next week. You never can tell.”

“All right,” she said.

The spring afternoon seemed like a million years ago.

“I wonder who that was at the door,” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said, reaching for the peppermint oil. He swallowed some. “Game of blackjack, missus?”

She settled back in her chair with the faintest wriggle of her body.

“Don’t mind if I do,” she said.

THE BEAUTIFUL LADY

IT SEEMED THERE was never a time when someone did not say, “There was the Rose of Sharon, there was the lilies of the valley.” “She walked like a princess. She could walk across the sands by the lake and the smallest breeze would blow the footprints away, she made so little mark in passing.” The voices moved with the calendar through his life. “Have you ever put your head down in a bed of mint-leaves in May?” “In the middle of the hottest summer night you ever knew, have you felt the curtains blow out into your room, cool and white, suddenly. And the first rain falling on the hot night roof over your head?” They went all around and over and about the beautiful lady, trying to describe what it was about her. “It’s like trying to tell you what red looks like, or blue, with your eyes shut.” But they never gave up trying.

“She couldn’t have been as beautiful as all that,” cried George Gray. “Show us a picture of her!”

“That’s fifty years ago,” they said. “I suppose if you search around town you’ll find one, but it’s doubtful. She died young. It seems the whole town turned out for her, she was only nineteen and unmarried, when she died. I think everyone was in love with the girl, she was that special.”

George Gray was alternately enchanted and in a rage with his elders. “Well, is she like Helen there, passing?” He pointed.

They only shook their heads with the faintest allowable degree of smugness. They had been to London, they had seen the queen. He had only been to Chicago, poor boy, and to Kankakee.

“Now there’s a lovely girl, really lovely,” said George, and he nodded to someone named Susanna passing in a car.

“That’s a flower without scent,” observed the old people. “So many girls today are flowers like that. When you touch them you find they’re made of paper, to last. Alice wasn’t made to last; she was like the first snow. You look out one December morning and it’s falling but you never see it touch. It never covers the grass, it never has and never will.”

“Oh, my God!” said George. “Shut up with this talk!”

He was only twenty, and hopelessly involved with every woman who sat rocking on a porch as he passed, or waved from a bus going by. He was always turning in circles and colliding with trees. He had fallen down several hypothetical elevator shafts and hit bottom a half dozen times, and still not found the woman he was looking for. There was a freckle on each, the nose was too long or the ear too large, or the mouth too open most of the time and making noise.

“All very well for you to talk,” he said. “Memory plays tricks. It doubles and redoubles, it squares things for you. Why if Alice Langley strolled by on that sidewalk right now, you wouldn’t know her.”

“That’s like saying,” said old man Pearce, “I wouldn’t know a certain species of transparent butterfly. Have you ever seen one, brought up from the Mexican rain-forests, the wings look like they were cut from blown glass, from crystal, you can see through them. When the butterfly sits on a flower it is a flower, when the butterfly sits on a peach it is a peach, there’s nothing of the butterfly at all, except what you see through and beyond its wings. Don’t tell me what I have or have not seen, young man, I have seen the butterfly with the crystal wings and you have not. Now, come on, let’s have a game of chess.”

GEORGE GRAY was alternately seized with paroxysms of despair and hatred. He wanted very much to see this rose, this butterfly, this first falling of the snows of winter, for he admired, above all else, beauty. If this woman was as they said she was, oh God to have a look at her! But this was patently impossible, the peach was harvested, the apple blossoms blown off in a wind that had failed fifty years before. You might just as well chase the rain with a sieve! And so his passion turned from despair to hatred and that variety of scorn best practised by a man only recently turned twenty. “A pack of lies!” he cried. “And fifty-two cards in the pack, all marked!”

“All except the Queen of Hearts,” said old man Pearce. “Not a mark on her, not a spot, not a smirch,” and lit his pipe.

“I’ll prove she wasn’t that beautiful!” cried George.

“How!”

“By her pictures, if I can find them! If you haven’t burnt them, to cover up your story!”

“Lad,” said Mr. Pearce. “Two thousand people don’t show up at a maiden lady’s funeral for no reason at all. People only show up in this world for things like the following: the golden spike being driven in the last tie of a railroad, the inauguration of a president, a man flies the Atlantic alone. They turn up for single events, lonely things, apart things, separate things, for things that are one of a kind and never another like it. She was one of a kind, lad, so why don’t you let her be, eh?”

“I’ll prove she wasn’t as beautiful as you say, it’s just you who were young and a fool, like myself,” said George.

“Part of what you just said is wisdom,” admitted the old man. “The last part.”

“If I have to go out to where’s she buried and dig her up and see for myself,” said George.

The old man let his pipe die out. After a long while of sitting in the summer night he said, “George, George. You’re cruel. They say youth is cruel. But this is the first time I’ve seen it this close. Oh, but you are mean, aren’t you? What’s got you so mean this year? Is it breaking up with Susanna last month?”