voice the droning quality of a bee bumbling through sultry air:

"Maizie Smith. Officer Jerry Dinwiddie."

* * * * *

Spring and her annual epidemic of aching hearts and aching joints had
advanced ten days and ten degrees. The season's first straw replacement
of derby had been noted by press. The city itched in its last days of
woolens and drank sassafras tea for nine successive mornings. A commuter
wore the first sweet sprig of lilac. The slightly East Sixties took to
boarding up house-fronts into bland, eyeless masks. The very East
Sixties began to smell.

When a strangely larger-eyed, strangely thinner, a whitened and somehow
a tightened Stella Schump drew up, those ten days later, before the
little old row with the little old iron balconies, there was already in
the ridiculous patches of front yards a light-green powdering of grass,
and from the doorbell of her own threshold there hung quite a little
spray of roses, waxy white against a frond of fern and a fold of black.
Deeper within that threshold, at the business of flooding its floor with
a run of water from a tipped pail and sweeping harshly into it, was the
vigorous, bony silhouette of Mrs. O'Connor, landlady.

For the second that it took her presence to be felt, Miss Schump stood
there trembling, all of a sudden more deeply and more rapidly. Then,
Mrs. O'Connor leaned out, bare arms folded atop her broom.

"So!" she said, a highly imperfect row of lower teeth seeming to jut
out, and her voice wavy with brogue and vibrant to express all its