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Cora bridled, virtuously. “Well, I think she’d better stay home and take care of that child of hers. I should think she’d let her husband earn the living. That child is all soul alone when she comes home from school. I hear her practising. I asked Mrs. Hoyt about her. She say’s she’s seen her. A pindling scrawny little thing, about ten years old. She leaves her alone all day.”

Ray encountered the Calhoun girl again, shortly after that, in the way encounters repeat themselves, once they have started.

“She didn’t say much but I guess her husband is a nit-wit. Funny how a smart girl like that always marries one of these sap-heads that can’t earn a living. She said she was working because she wanted her child to have the advantages she’d missed. That’s the way she put it.”

One heard the long-legged, melancholy child next door practising at the piano daily at four. Cora said it drove her crazy. But then, Cora was rarely home at four. “Well,” she said now, virtuously, “I don’t know what she calls advantages. The way she neglects that kid. Look at her! I guess if she had a little more mother and a little less education it’d be better for her.”

“Guess that’s right,” Ray agreed.

It was in September that Cora began to talk about the mink coat. A combination anniversary and Christmas gift. December would mark their twelfth anniversary. A mink coat.

Raymond remembered that his mother had had a mink coat, back there in Michigan, years ago. She always had taken it out in November and put it away in moth balls and tar paper in March. She had done this for years and years. It was a cheerful yellow mink, with a slightly darker marking running through it, and there had been little mink tails all around the bottom edge of it. It had spread comfortably at the waist. Women had had hips in those days. With it his mother had carried a mink muff; a small yellow-brown cylinder just big enough for her two hands. It had been her outdoor uniform, winter after winter, for as many years as he could remember of his boyhood. When she had died the mink coat had gone to his sister Carrie, he remembered.

A mink coat. The very words called up in his mind sharp winter days; the pungent moth-bally smell of his mother’s fur-coated bosom when she had kissed him good-bye that day he left for Chicago; comfort; womanliness. A mink coat.

“How much could you get one for? A mink coat.”

Cora hesitated a moment. “Oh–I guess you could get a pretty good one for three thousand.”

“You’re crazy,” said Ray, unemotionally. He was not angry. He was amused.

But Cora was persistent. Her coat was a sight. She had to have something. She never had had a real fur coat.

“How about your Hudson seal?”

“Hudson seal! Did you ever see any seals in the Hudson! Fake fur. I’ve never had a really decent piece of fur in my life. Always some mangy make-believe. All the girls in the Crowd are getting new coats this year. The woman next door–Mrs. Hoyt–is talking of getting one. She says Mr. Hoyt—-“

“Say, who are these Hoyts, anyway?”

Ray came home early one day to find the door to 618 open. He glanced in, involuntarily. A man sat in the living room–a large, rather red-faced man, in his shirt-sleeves, relaxed, comfortable, at ease. From the open door came the most tantalizing and appetizing smells of candied sweet potatoes, a browning roast, steaming vegetables.

Mrs. Hoyt had run in to bring a slice of fresh-baked chocolate cake to Cora. She often brought in dishes of exquisitely prepared food thus, but Raymond had never before encountered her. Cora introduced them. Mrs. Hoyt smiled, nervously, and said she must run away and tend to her dinner. And went. Ray looked after her. He strode into the kitchenette where Cora stood, hatted, at the sink.