far the sheerer. Short-story correspondence-schools would call it the
brief downward action leading to denouement.

With Stella Schump it was almost a straight declivity. There were days
of the black kind of inertia when to lift the head from its sullen
inclination to rest chin on chest was not to be endured. There was
actually something sick in the eyes, little cataracts of gray cloud
seeming to float across. She would sit hunched and looking out of them
so long and so unseeingly that her very stare seemed to sleep.

She had removed the stick or two that remained unsold to a little rear
room high up in a large, damp-smelling lodging-house on West Twentieth
Street, within view of a shipping-pier. There was a sign inserted in the
lower front window:

ROOMS. LIGHT HOUSEKEEPING.

INQUIRE WITHIN.

She would sit in that room, so heavy with its odor of mildew, her window
closed against the long, sweetly warm days, hunched dumbly on the
cot-edge and staring into the stripe and vine, stripe and vine of the
wall-paper design, or lie back when the ache along her spine began to
set in. There were occasional ventures to a corner bake-shop for raisin
rolls and to the delicatessen next door for a quarter-pound of Bologna
sausage sliced into slivers while she waited. She would sit on the
cot-edge munching alternately from sliver to roll, gulping through a
throat that was continually tight with wanting to cry, yet would not
relax for that relief.