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They were spending a good deal of money now, but Ray jousted the landlord, the victualler, the furrier, the milliner, the hosiery maker, valiantly and still came off the victor. He did not have as much time as he would have liked to work on the new invention. The invisible rim. It was calculated so to blend with the glass of the lens as to be, in appearance, one with it, while it still protected the eyeglass from breakage. “Fortune in it, girlie,” he would say, happily, to Cora. “Million dollars, that’s all.”

He had been working on the invisible rim for five years. Familiarity with it had bred contempt in Cora. Once, in a temper, “Invisible is right,” she had said, slangily.

They had occupied the four-room apartment for five years. Cora declared it was getting beyond her. “You can’t get any decent help. The washwoman acts as if she was doing me a favour coming from eight to four, for four dollars and eighty-five cents. And yesterday she said she couldn’t come to clean any more on Saturdays. I’m sick and tired of it.”

Raymond shook a sympathetic head. “Same way down at the store. Seems everything’s that way now. You can’t get help and you can’t get goods. You ought to hear our customers. Yesterday I thought I’d go clear out of my nut, trying to pacify them.”

Cora inserted the entering wedge, deftly. “Goodness knows I love my home. But the way things are now …”

“Yeh,” Ray said, absently. When he spoke like that Cora knew that the invisible rim was revolving in his mind. In another moment he would be off to the little cabinet in the bathroom where he kept his tools and instruments.

She widened the opening. “I noticed as I passed to-day that those new one-room kitchenette apartments on Sheridan will be ready for occupancy October first.” He was going toward the door. “They say they’re wonderful.”

“Who wants to live in one room, anyway?”

“It’s really two rooms–and the kitchenette. There’s the living room–perfectly darling–and a sort of combination breakfast room and kitchen. The breakfast room is partitioned off with sort of cupboards so that it’s really another room. And so handy!”

“How’d you know?”

“I went in–just to look at them–with one of the girls.”

Until then he had been unconscious of her guile. But now, suddenly, struck by a hideous suspicion–“Say, looka here. If you think—-“

“Well, it doesn’t hurt to look at ’em, does it!”

A week later. “Those kitchenette apartments on Sheridan are almost all gone. One of the girls was looking at one on the sixth floor. There’s a view of the lake. The kitchen’s the sweetest thing. All white enamel. And the breakfast room thing is done in Italian.”

“What d’you mean–done in Italian?”

“Why–uh–Italian period furniture, you know. Dark and rich. The living room’s the same. Desk, and table, and lamps.”

“Oh, they’re furnished?”

“Complete. Down to the kettle covers and the linen and all. The work there would just be play. All the comforts of a home, with none of the terrible aggravations.”

“Say, look here, Coral, we don’t want to go to work and live in any one room. You wouldn’t be happy. Why, we’d feel cooped up. No room to stretch…. Why, say, how about the beds? If there isn’t a bedroom how about the beds? Don’t people sleep in those places?”

“There are Murphy beds, silly.”

“Murphy? Who’s he?”

“Oh, goodness, I don’t know! The man who invented ’em, I suppose. Murphy.”

Raymond grinned in anticipation of his own forthcoming joke. “I should think they’d call ’em Morphy beds.” Then, at her blank stare. “You know–short for Morpheus, god of sleep. Learned about him at high school.”

Cora still looked blank. Cora hardly ever understood Ray’s jokes, or laughed at them. He would turn, chuckling, to find her face a blank. Not even bewildered, or puzzled, or questioning. Blank. Unheeding. Disinterested as a slate.

Three days later Cora developed an acute pain in her side. She said it was nothing. Just worn out with the work, and the worry and the aggravation, that’s all. It’ll be all right.