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“Oh, come on, Ray! Don’t be a wet blanket…. Lookit him! I bet he’s thinking about those smoked glasses again. Eh, Atwater? He’s in a daze about that new rim that won’t show on the glasses. Come out of it! First thing you know you’ll lose your little Cora.”

There was little danger of that. Though Cora flirted mildly with the husbands of the other girls in the Crowd (they all did) she was true to Ray.

Ray was always talking of building a little place of their own. People were beginning to move farther and farther north, into the suburbs.

“Little place of your own,” Ray would say, “that’s the only way to live. Then you’re not paying it all out in rent to the other feller. Little place of your own. That’s the right idear.”

But as the years went by, and Ray earned more and more money, he and Cora seemed to be getting farther and farther away from the right idear. In the $28.50 apartment Cora’s morning marketing had been an orderly daily proceeding. Meat, vegetables, fruit, dry groceries. But now the maidless four-room apartment took on, in spite of its cumbersome furnishings, a certain air of impermanence.

“Ray, honey, I haven’t a scrap in the house. I didn’t get home until almost six. Those darned old street cars. I hate ’em. Do you mind going over Jo Bauer’s to eat? I won’t go, because Myrtle served a regular spread at four. I couldn’t eat a thing. D’you mind?”

“Why, no.” He would get into his coat again and go out into the bleak November wind-swept street to Bauer’s restaurant.

Cora was always home when Raymond got there at six. She prided herself on this. She would say, primly, to her friends, “I make a point of being there when Ray gets home. Even if I have to cut a round of bridge. If a woman can’t be there when a man gets home from work I’d like to know what she’s good for, anyway.”

The girls in the Crowd said she was spoiling Raymond. She told Ray this. “They think I’m old-fashioned. Well, maybe I am. But I guess I never pretended to be anything but a home girl.”

“That’s right,” Ray would answer. “Say, that’s the way you caught me. With that home-girl stuff.”

“Caught you!” The thin straight line of the mouth. “If you think for one minute—-“

“Oh, now, dear. You know what I mean, sweetheart. Why, say, I never could see any girl until I met you. You know that.”

He was as honestly in love with her as he had been nine years before. Perhaps he did not feel now, as then, that she had conferred a favour upon him in marrying him. Or if he did he must have known that he had made fair return for such favour.

Cora had a Hudson seal coat now, with a great kolinsky collar. Her vivid face bloomed rosily in this soft frame. Cora was getting a little heavier. Not stout, but heavier, somehow. She tried, futilely, to reduce. She would starve herself at home for days, only to gain back the vanished pounds at one afternoon’s orgy of whipped-cream salad, and coffee, and sweets at the apartment of some girl in the Crowd. Dancing had come in and the Crowd had taken it up vociferously. Raymond was not very good at it. He had not filled out with the years. He still was lean and tall and awkward. The girls in the crowd tried to avoid dancing with him. That often left Cora partnerless unless she wanted to dance again and again with Raymond.

“How can you expect the boys to ask me to dance when you don’t dance with their wives! Good heavens, if they can learn, you can. And for pity’s sake don’t count! You’re so fun-ny!”

He tried painstakingly to heed her advice, but his long legs made a sorry business of it. He heard one of the girls refer to him as “that giraffe.” He had put his foot through an absurd wisp of tulle that she insisted on calling a train.