the cut-glass bowl

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

There was a stone age and a bronze age, and many years afterward a cut-glass age. In the cut-glass age, when young ladies had persuaded young men with long, curly mustaches to marry them, they sat down several months after the marriage and wrote thank-you notes for all sorts of cut-glass presents—bowls, glasses, dishes, and vases.

Right after the wedding the punch bowls were arranged on the sideboard with the big bowl in the centre; the glasses were set up in the china – closet; the candlesticks were put at both ends of things; and then the struggle for existence began. The cat knocked the little bowl off the sideboard; then the wine glasses got leg fractures, and even the dinner glasses disappeared one by one, the last one ending up, scarred and maimed, as a tooth brush holder on the bathroom shelf. But by the time all this had happened the cut-glass age was over, anyway.

That day Mrs. Roger Fairboalt came to see the beautiful Mrs. Harold Piper.

“My dear,” said the curious Mrs. Roger Fairboalt, “I love your house.”

“I’m so glad,” said the beautiful Mrs. Harold Piper, lights appearing in her young, dark eyes; “and you must come often. I’m almost always alone in the afternoon.”

Mrs. Fairboalt would have liked to remark that she didn’t believe this at all and couldn’t see how she’d be expected to—it was all over town that Mr. Freddy Gedney had been coming to Mrs. Piper five afternoons a week for the past six months.

“I love the dining room most,” she said, “all that marvelous china, and that huge cut-glass bowl.”

Mrs. Piper laughed, so prettily that Mrs. Fairboalt’s suspicions about the Freddy Gedney story vanished.

“Oh, that big bowl! There’s a story about that bowl—”

“Oh—”

“You remember young Carleton Canby? Well, he was very attentive at one time, and the night I told him I was going to marry Harold, seven years ago, in ninety-two, he said: ‘Evylyn, I’m going to give a present that’s as hard as you are and as beautiful and as empty and as easy to see through.’ He frightened me a little—his eyes were so black. I thought he was going to give me a haunted house or something that would explode when you opened it. That bowl came, and of course it’s beautiful. Its diameter or something is two and a half feet—or perhaps it’s three and a half. Anyway, the sideboard is really too small for it; it sticks way out.” “My dear, wasn’t that odd! And he left town about then, didn’t he?” “Yes, he went West—or South—or somewhere,” answered Mrs. Piper.

Mrs. Fairboalt looked around once again putting on her gloves. It was really the nicest smaller house in town, and Mrs. Piper had talked of moving to a larger one. Harold Piper must be coining money.

As she turned into the sidewalk she assumed that disapproving, faintly unpleasant expression that almost all successful women of forty wear on the street.

If I were Harold Piper, she thought, I’d spend a little less time on business and a little more time at home. Some friend should speak to him.

But if Mrs. Fairboalt had considered it a successful afternoon she would have named it a triumph had she waited two minutes longer. For at that moment a very good-looking young man turned up the walk to the Piper house. Mrs. Piper answered the doorbell herself and led the visitor quickly into the library.

“I had to see you,” he began wildly; “your note turned me insane. Did Harold frighten you into this?”

She shook her head.

“I’m through, Fred,” she said slowly. “He came home last night sick with it. Jessie Piper went down to his office and told him. He was hurt and—oh, I can’t help seeing it his way, Fred. He says we’ve been club gossip all summer and he didn’t know it, and now he understands snatches of conversation and hints people have dropped about me. He’s very angry, Fred, and he loves me and I love him—”

Gedney nodded slowly and half closed his eyes.

“Yes,” he said, “yes, my trouble’s like yours. I can see other people’s points of view too plainly.” His gray eyes met her dark ones. “My God, Evylyn, I’ve been sitting down at the office all day looking at the outside of your letter, and looking at it and looking at it—”

“You’ve got to go, Fred. I gave him my word of honor I wouldn’t see you. I know just how far I can go with Harold, and I can’t be here with you this evening.”

They were still standing, and as she spoke, she made a little movement toward the door. Gedney looked at her miserably—and then suddenly both of them heard steps on the walk outside. Instantly her arm grasped his coat, she led him through the big door into the dark dining room.

“I’ll make him go upstairs,” she whispered, “don’t move till you hear him on the stairs. Then go out the front way.”

Then he was alone listening as she greeted her husband in the hall.

Harold Piper was thirty-six, nine years older than his wife. He was handsome—except for the eyes that were too close together and a certain woodenness that appeared on his face sometimes. His attitude toward this Gedney matter was typical of all his attitudes. He had told Evylyn that he considered the subject closed and would never reproach her.

He greeted Evylyn with emphasized cordiality this evening.

“You’ll have to hurry and dress, Harold,” she said, “we’re going to the Bronsons’.”

He nodded.

“It doesn’t take me long to dress, dear,” and he walked on into the library. Evylyn’s heart sank.

“Harold—” she began and followed him. He was lighting a cigarette.

“You’ll have to hurry, Harold,” she finished, standing in the doorway.

“Why?” he asked, “you’re not dressed yourself yet, Evie.”

He stretched out in a chair and unfolded a newspaper. Evylyn saw that this meant at least ten minutes—and Gedney was standing breathless in the next room. Supposing Harold decided that before he went upstairs he wanted a drink from the sideboard. It occurred to her to bring it to him herself.

But at the same moment Harold rose and, throwing his paper down, came toward her.

“Evie, dear,” he said, putting his arms around her, “I hope you’re not thinking about last night—” She moved close to him, trembling. “I know,” he continued, “we all make mistakes.”

Evylyn hardly heard him. She was wondering if she could take him upstairs. She thought of playing sick—unfortunately, she knew he would lay her on the couch and bring her whiskey.

Suddenly she heard a very faint but quite unmistakable creak from the floor of the dining room. Fred was trying to get out the back way.

Then a hollow ringing note like a gong echoed and re-echoed through the house. Gedney’s arm had struck the big cut-glass bowl.

“What’s that!” cried Harold. “Who’s there?”

He ran to the next room, she heard the door open, and in wild despair, she rushed into the kitchen after him. Her husband’s arm slowly let Gedney’s neck go, and he stood there very still, first in amazement, then with pain in his face.

“My golly!” he said in bewilderment.

He turned as if to jump again at Gedney, stopped, and gave a little laugh.

“You people—you people—” Evylyn’s arms were around him, but he pushed her away and sank into a kitchen chair. “You’ve been doing things to me, Evylyn. Why, you little devil! You little devil!”

She had never felt so sorry for him; she had never loved him so much.

“It wasn’t her fault,” said Gedney. “I just came.” But Harold shook his head. Evylyn felt anger; her eyelids were burning.

“Get out!” she screamed to Gedney, her dark eyes blazing, little fists beating helplessly on his arm. “You did this! Get out of here—get out—get out! Get out!”

When Mrs. Harold Piper was thirty-five, women said she was still beautiful; men said she was no longer pretty. And this was probably because the qualities in her beauty that women had feared and men had followed had vanished. Her eyes were still as large and as dark and as sad, but the mystery had vanished; their sadness was now only human, and she had developed a habit, when she was shocked or annoyed, of twitching her brows together and blinking several times.

A month after the Freddy Gedney affair things had gone on very much as they had before externally. But in those few minutes, during which she had discovered how much she loved her husband, Evylyn had realized how much she had hurt him. For a month she struggled against silences, wild reproaches and accusations, and he laughed at her bitterly—and then she, too, started to keep silence, and a barrier dropped between them. The love that had risen in her she gave Donald, her little boy.

The next year a load of mutual interests and responsibilities and some memories from the past brought husband and wife together again—but soon Evylyn realized that there simply wasn’t anything left. That time of silence had slowly dried up any affection between them.

She began for the first time to seek women friends, to prefer books she had read before, to sew a little where she could watch her two children to whom she was devoted.

She worried about such little things as crumbs on the dinner table.

Her thirty-fifth birthday was an exceptionally busy one, and in the late afternoon she discovered that she was quite tired. Ten years before she would have lain down and slept, but now she had a feeling that things needed watching: maids were cleaning downstairs, and there were sure to be grocery-men that had to be talked to—and then there was a letter to write Donald, who was fourteen and in his first year away at school.

She was thinking about Donald when she heard a sudden familiar signal from little Julie downstairs. Her brows twitched together, and she blinked.

“Julie!” she called.

“Ah-h-h-ow!” answered Julie. Then the voice of Hilda, the second maid, went up the stairs.

“She cut herself a little, Mrs Piper.”

Evylyn found a torn handkerchief, and hurried downstairs. In a moment Julie was crying in her arms as she searched for the cut.

“My thu-umb!” explained Julie. “Oh-h-h-h, it hurts.”

“It was the bowl here,” said Hilda apologetically.

“It was waiting on the floor while I polished the sideboard, and Julie come along and decided to play with it. She just scratched herself.”

Evylyn frowned heavily at Hilda, and began tearing strips off the handkerchief.

“Now—let’s see it, dear. There!” Julie surveyed her thumb doubtfully. She sniffled.

“You precious!” cried Evylyn and kissed her, but before she left the room she gave Hilda another frown. Careless! Servants all that way nowadays. If she could get a good Irishwoman—but you couldn’t any more—and these Swedes—

At five o’clock Harold arrived and, coming up to her room, threatened to kiss her thirty-five times for her birthday. Evylyn resisted.

“You’ve been drinking,” she said shortly, and then added, “a little. You know I hate the smell of it.”

“Evie,” he said, after a pause, sitting in a chair by the window, “I can tell you something now. I guess you’ve known things haven’t been going quite right down-town.”

She was standing at the window combing her hair, but at these words she turned and looked at him.

“What do you mean? You’ve always said there was room for more than one wholesale hardware house in town.”

“There was,” said Harold, “but this Clarence Ahearn is a smart man.”

“I was surprised when you said he was coming to dinner.”

“Evie, after January first ‘The Clarence Ahearn Company’ becomes ‘The Ahearn, Piper Company’—and ‘Piper Brothers’ as a company ceases to exist.”

Evylyn was shocked. The sound of his name in second place was somehow suspicious to her.

“I don’t understand, Harold.” “Well, Evie, Ahearn has been fooling around with Marx. It’s a question of capital, Evie, and ‘Ahearn and Marx’ would have had the business just like ‘Ahearn and Piper’ is going to now.” He paused and coughed. “Ahearn and I had lunch together today and I thought it’d be nice to have him and his wife up tonight—just have nine, mostly family. After all, it’s a big thing for me, Evie.”

Evylyn was not against the visit—but the idea of “Piper Brothers” becoming “The Ahearn, Piper Company” made her nervous.

Half an hour later, as she began to dress for dinner, she heard his voice from down-stairs.

“Oh, Evie, come down!”

She went out into the hall: “What is it?”

“I want you to help me make some of that punch before dinner.”

She descended the stairs and found him grouping the ingredients on the dining room table. She went to the sideboard and, took one of the bowls.

“Oh, no,” he protested, “let’s use the big one. There’ll be Ahearn and his wife and you and I and Milton, that’s five, and Tom and Jessie, that’s seven, and your sister and Joe Ambler, that’s nine. You don’t know how quick that stuff goes when you make it.” “We’ll use this bowl,” she insisted. “It’ll hold plenty. You know how Tom is.”

Tom Lowrie, Jessie’s husband, Harold’s first cousin, tended to drink quite a lot.

Harold shook his head.

“Don’t be foolish. That one holds only about three quarts and there’s nine of us, and the servants’ll want some—and it isn’t strong punch. It’s better to have a lot, Evie; we don’t have to drink all of it.”

“I say the small one.”

“No; be reasonable.”

“I am reasonable,” she said. “I don’t want any drunken men in the house.”

“Now, Evie—”

He took the smaller bowl to put it back. Instantly her hands were on it. There was a momentary struggle, and then he raised his side, slipped it from her fingers, and carried it to the sideboard.

She looked at him and tried to make her expression reproachful, but he only laughed.

At seven-thirty Evylyn descended the stairs. Mrs. Ahearn, a little woman concealing a slight nervousness under red hair, greeted her. Evylyn disliked her on the spot, but she rather liked the husband.

“I’m glad to know Piper’s wife,” he said simply. “Your husband and I are going to see a lot of each other in the future.”

She bowed, smiled, and turned to greet the others: Milton Piper, Harold’s quiet younger brother; the two Lowries, Jessie and Tom; Irene, her own unmarried sister; and finally Joe Ambler, a confirmed bachelor and Irene’s beau.

Harold led the way into dinner. “We’re having a punch evening,” he announced—Evylyn saw that he had already sampled the drink—“so there won’t be any cocktails except the punch.”

All through dinner there was punch, and Evylyn knew she had been right about the bowl; it was still half full. She resolved to speak with Harold, but when the women left the table Mrs. Ahearn came up to her, and she found herself talking about cities and dressmakers.

“We’ve moved around a lot,” chattered Mrs. Ahearn. “Oh, yes, we’ve never stayed so long in a town before—but I do hope we’re here for good. I like it here; don’t you?” “Well, you see, I’ve always lived here, so,—”

“Oh, that’s true,” said Mrs. Ahearn and laughed. Evylyn suspected that it was her society laugh.

“Your husband is a very clever man, I imagine.”

“Oh, yes,” Mrs. Ahearn assured her. “Ideas and enthusiasm, you know. Finds out what he wants and then goes and gets it.”

Evylyn nodded. She was wondering if the men were still drinking punch back in the dining room. Mrs. Ahearn’s story went on, but Evylyn had ceased to listen. It wasn’t really a large house, she thought. Perhaps this partnership might . . . she began to think about a new house . . .

Then there was a sound of chairs in the dining room and the men came in. Evylyn saw at once that her worst fears were realized. Harold’s face was flushed and he didn’t speak clearly, while Tom Lowrie narrowly missed Irene’s lap when he tried to sink onto the couch beside her. Joe Ambler was smiling and purring on his cigar. Only Ahearn and Milton Piper seemed unaffected.

“It’s a pretty fine town, Ahearn,” said Ambler, “you’ll find that.”

“I’ve found it so,” said Ahearn pleasantly.

“You find it more, Ahearn,” said Harold, nodding. He started to talk about the city, and Evylyn wondered if it bored everyone as it bored her. Apparently not. They were all listening attentively. Evylyn broke in at the first gap.

“Where’ve you been living, Mr. Ahearn?” she asked interestedly.

Then she remembered that Mrs. Ahearn had told her, but it didn’t matter. Harold mustn’t talk so much. But he continued his talk.

“Tell you, Ahearn. First you wanna get a house up here on the hill. Wanna have it so people say: ‘There’s Ahearn house’.”

Evylyn flushed. This didn’t sound right at all. Still Ahearn only nodded.

“Have you been looking—” But her words trailed off unheard as Harold’s voice went on.

“Get house. Then you get know people. Snobbish town first toward outsider, but not long—not after know you. People like you”—he pointed at Ahearn and his wife—“all right.”

Evylyn looked at her brother-in – law, but before he could do anything thick murmuring came out of Tom Lowrie, who still gripped the dead cigar with his teeth.

“Huma uma ho huma ahdy um—”

“What?” demanded Harold.

With difficulty Tom removed the cigar—that is, he removed part of it, and then blew the rest of it across the room, where it landed in Mrs. Ahearn’s lap.

“Beg pardon,” he murmured, and rose with the intention of going after it. Milton’s hand on his coat put him back down.

“I was saying,” continued Tom, “before that happened”—he waved his hand apologetically toward Mrs.

Ahearn—“I was saying I heard all truth about that Country Club matter.”

Milton leaned and whispered something to him.

“Leave me alone,” he said; “know what I’m doing. That’s what they came for.”

Evylyn sat there in a panic. She saw her sister’s sardonic expression and Mrs. Ahearn’s face turning red.

“I heard who’s been keeping you out, and he’s not a bit better than you. I can fix the whole thing up. Would’ve before, but I didn’t know you. Harold told me you felt bad about the thing—”

Milton Piper rose suddenly to his feet. In a second everyone was standing and Milton was saying something very hurriedly about having to go early. Then Mrs. Ahearn swallowed and turned with a forced smile toward Jessie. Evylyn saw Tom lean forward and put his hand on Ahearn’s shoulder—and suddenly she was listening to a new voice at her elbow, and, turning, found Hilda, the second maid.

“Please, Missis Piper, I think Julie got her hand poisoned. It’s all swollen up and her cheeks are hot and she’s moaning—”

“Julie is?” Evylyn asked.

She turned quickly, sought with her eyes for Mrs. Ahearn, slipped toward her.

“If you’ll excuse me, Mrs.—” She had forgotten the name, but she went right on: “My little girl’s sick. I’ll be down when I can.” She turned and ran quickly up the stairs, away from a loud discussion in the centre of the room that seemed to be developing into an argument.

She found Julie giving out odd little cries in fever. She touched her cheeks. They were burning. She followed the arm down under the cover until she found the hand. Hilda was right. The whole thumb was swollen to the wrist and in the centre was a little inflamed sore. Bloodpoisoning! her mind cried in terror. The bandage had come off the cut and she’d gotten something in it. She’d cut it at three o’clock—it was now nearly eleven. Eight hours. Bloodpoisoning couldn’t possibly develop so soon. She rushed to the telephone.

Doctor Martin across the street was out. Doctor Foulke, their family physician, didn’t answer. In desperation she called her throat specialist, and bit her lip nervously while he looked up the numbers of two physicians.

During that interminable moment she thought she heard loud voices downstairs—but she seemed to be in another world now. After fifteen minutes she located a physician who sounded angry. She ran back to the nursery and, looking at the hand, found it was even more swollen.

“Oh, God!” she cried. With a vague idea of getting some hot water, she rose and started toward the door.

Out in the hall she heard a single loud, insistent voice, but as she reached the head of the stairs it ceased and an outer door banged.

Only Harold and Milton were in the music room. Harold was leaning against a chair, his face very pale, and his collar open.

“What’s the matter?”

Milton looked at her anxiously. “There was a little trouble—” Then Harold saw her and began to speak.

“Insult my own cousin in my own house. Insult my own cousin—” “Tom had trouble with Ahearn and Harold interfered,” said Milton.

“My Lord, Milton,” cried Evylyn, “couldn’t you have done something?”

“I tried; I—”

“Julie’s sick,” she interrupted; “she’s poisoned herself.”

Harold looked up.

“Julie sick?”

Looking around the room, Evylyn suddenly spotted the big punch-bowl still on the table, the liquid from melted ice on its bottom. She heard steps on the front stairs—it was Milton helping Harold up—and then a mumble: “Why, Julie’s all right.” “Don’t let him go into the nursery!” she shouted.

The hours became a nightmare. The doctor arrived just before midnight and within half an hour had lanced the wound. He left at two after giving her the addresses of two nurses to call up and promising to return at half past six. It was blood- poisoning.

At four, leaving Hilda by the bedside, she went to her room, and slipped out of her evening dress. She put on a housedress and returned to the nursery while Hilda went to make coffee.

At noon she looked into Harold’s room. She found him awake and staring very miserably at the ceiling. He turned his head to her. For a minute she hated him, couldn’t speak.

“What time is it?” he asked.

“Noon.”

“I was a fool—”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Julie’s got bloodpoisoning. They may”—she choked over the words—“they think she’ll have to lose her hand.”

“What?”

“She cut herself on that—that bowl.”

“Last night?”

“Oh, does it matter?” she cried; “she’s got blood-poisoning. Can’t you hear?”

“I’ll get dressed,” he said.

A great wave of weariness and pity for him rolled over her. After all, it was his trouble, too.

“Yes,” she answered, “I suppose you’d better.”

If Evylyn’s beauty had hesitated in her early thirties it came to an abrupt decision just afterward and completely left her. Wrinkles on her face suddenly deepened and flesh collected rapidly on her legs and hips and arms. Her habit of twitching her brows together had become an expression—she was reading or speaking and even sleeping with it. She was forty-six.

Their fortune had gone down rather than up. Evylyn and Harold looked at each other with the toleration they might have felt for broken old chairs; Evylyn worried a little when he was sick and did her best to be cheerful under the wearying depression of living with a disappointed man.

Family bridge was over for the evening and she sighed with relief. She had made more mistakes than usual this evening and she didn’t care. Irene shouldn’t have made that remark bout the infantry being so dangerous. There had been no letter for three weeks now, and it made her nervous.

Harold had gone upstairs, so she stepped out for a breath of fresh air. There was a bright glamour of moonlight on the sidewalk, and with a little laugh, she remembered one long moonlight affair of her youth. It was astonishing to think that life had once been the sum of her love affairs. It was now the sum of her problems.

There was the problem of Julie—Julie was thirteen, and lately she preferred to stay always in her room reading. A few years before she had been frightened at the idea of going to school, and Evylyn could not make her, so the girl grew up in her mother’s shadow, a pitiful little figure with the artificial hand that she made no attempt to use but kept in her pocket. For a while her dresses were made without pockets, but Julie was so miserable that Evylyn weakened and never tried the experiment again.

The problem of Donald had been different from the start. She had attempted in vain to keep him near her, but lately the problem of Donald had been snatched out of her hands; his division had been abroad for three months.

What a happy youth she must have had! She remembered her pony, Bijou, and the trip to Europe with her mother when she was eighteen—

“Very, very complicated,” she said aloud to the moon, and, stepping inside, was about to close the door when she heard a noise in the library.

It was Martha, the middle-aged servant: they kept only one now.

“Why, Martha!” she said in surprise.

Martha turned quickly.

“Oh, I thought you were upstairs. I was just—”

“Is anything the matter?”

Martha hesitated.

“No; I—” She stood there fidgeting. “It was a letter, Mrs. Piper, that I put somewhere.”

“A letter? Your own letter?” asked Evylyn, switching on the light.

“No, it was to you. It was this afternoon, Mrs. Piper, in the last mail. The postman gave it to me and then the back doorbell rang. I had it in my hand, so I must have stuck it somewhere. I thought I’d just slip in now and find it.”

“What sort of a letter? From Mr. Donald?”

“No, it was an advertisement, maybe, or a business letter. It was a long, narrow one, I remember.”

They began a search through the music room, looking on trays and mantelpieces, and then through the library. Martha paused in despair.

“I can’t think where. I went straight to the kitchen. The dining room, maybe.” She started hopefully for the dining room, but turned suddenly at the sound of a gasp behind her.

Evylyn had sunk in a chair, twitching her brows very close together, eyes blinking.

“Are you sick?”

For a minute there was no answer. Evylyn sat there very still.

“Are you sick?” she repeated.

“No,” said Evylyn slowly, “but I know where the letter is. Go away, Martha. I know.”

Martha left her, and still Evylyn sat there, only the muscles around her eyes moving. She knew now where the letter was—she knew as well as if she had put it there herself. And she felt what the letter was. It was long and narrow like an advertisement, but up in the corner in large letters it said “War Department” and, in smaller letters below, “Official Business.” She knew it lay there in the big bowl with her name on the outside and her soul’s death within.

Rising uncertainly, she walked toward the dining room, feeling her way along the bookcases and through the doorway. After a moment she found the light and switched it on.

There was the bowl, ponderous and glittering, triumphantly ominous. She took a step forward and paused again; another step and she would see over the top and into the inside—another step and she would see an edge of white—

In a moment she was tearing it open, holding it before her while the typewritten page glared out at her. Then it fluttered like a bird to the floor. The house was suddenly very quiet.

And in that instant it was as if this were not, after all, Donald’s hour. It became all about Evylyn and this cold thing of beauty, a gift from a man whose face she had long forgotten. With its massive passivity it lay there in the centre of her house as it had lain for years, never aging, never changing.

Evylyn sat down on the edge of the table and stared at it fascinated. It seemed to be smiling now, a very cruel smile, as if to say:

“You see, this time I didn’t have to hurt you directly. I didn’t bother. You know it was I who took your son away. You know how cold I am and how hard and how beautiful, because once you were just as cold and hard and beautiful.”

The bowl seemed suddenly to turn itself over and then grow until it became a great canopy that glittered and trembled over the room, over the house. As the walls melted slowly into mist, Evylyn saw that it was still moving out, out and far away from her, shutting off suns and moons and stars. And under it walked all the people, and the light that came through to them was twisted until shadow seemed light and light seemed shadow—until the whole panorama of the world became changed under the bowl.

Then there came a far-away voice like a low, clear bell. It came from the centre of the bowl and then bounced toward her eagerly.

“You see, I am fate,” it shouted, “and stronger than your small plans; and I am how-things-turn-out and I am different from your little dreams, and I am all the accidents; and the little minutes that shape the crucial hours are mine. I am the exception that proves no rules, the limits of your control.”

The sound stopped; the echoes rolled away to the edge of the bowl and back to the centre where they hummed for a moment and died. Then the room began to grow smaller and smaller as if the walls wanted to crush her. Suddenly the bowl turned over—and lay there on the sideboard, shining and reflecting in a hundred prisms many-coloured gleams and crossings of light.

With a desperate, frantic energy Evylyn stretched both her arms around the bowl. She must be quick—she must be strong. She tightened her arms until they ached and with a mighty effort raised the bowl and held it. She turned and went toward the front door. She must be quick—she must be strong. The blood in her arms throbbed, but the feel of the cool glass was good.

Out the front door she went to the stone steps, and there, with a last effort, turned half round—for a second her numb fingers clung to the glass, and in that second she lost her balance and, with a despairing cry, her arms still around the bowl . . . she fell down . . .

Far down the block the crash was heard; upstairs a tired man woke up and a little girl whimpered. And all over the moonlit sidewalk around the still, black form, hundreds of prisms and splinters of glass reflected the light in little gleams of blue, and black edged with yellow, and yellow, and crimson edged with black.